Instant Indexing Error

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the Instant Indexing feature. The 403 Forbidden error you encountered typically indicates that there is a problem with verifying the ownership of the URL you are trying to index. Here are a few steps you can take to resolve this issue:

1. Check API Key: Since you mentioned that the API Key Location is working and displaying your API key, ensure that this key is correctly set in your Rank Math settings. You can do this by navigating to Rank Math SEO → Instant Indexing → IndexNow API Settings → API Key and confirming that the key matches what is shown in the new tab.

2. Verify Ownership: To verify ownership of your site, make sure that the API key is accessible to search engines and that it is not blocked by your robots.txt file. You can check this by clicking on the Check Key button available under the API Key location in Rank Math.

3. Check Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Settings: Ensure that your service account has the necessary permissions to access the Web Search API. You may need to adjust the permissions or roles assigned to your service account in GCP.

4. Clear Cache: After making any changes, clear your website’s cache to ensure that the latest settings are applied.

5. IndexNow History: Check the IndexNow History tab in Rank Math’s Instant Indexing settings to see if there are any additional error messages or response codes associated with your submissions. A “200 – OK” response code indicates successful submission, while other codes may provide more insight into what went wrong.

If you continue to experience issues after following these steps, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further. Thank you for raising this concern!

Sources:
How to Fix 403 Forbidden Error with IndexNow » Rank Math
How to Fix 403 Forbidden Error with IndexNow » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

To fix the issue, please make sure the service account is listed as the Owner of the site in the Search Console.

You can follow the steps illustrated here to solve the issue:
https://rankmath.com/blog/google-indexing-api/#403-permission-denied

Once done, clear your website’s cache and check again.

However, please note that Google only allows the API only for two types of websites (job posting and live streams) and goes through rigorous spam detection due to recent changes in Google, it’s much more difficult to get URLs into the API.

So, unless you have one of the website types we mentioned and the content is unique, you won’t be able to use this feature consistently and you shouldn’t as the API was never intended for it as mentioned in our own documentation also.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.