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How to Use Returned Status Codes#

All submission methods return the status code of the response, e.g. 200 for success, 202 for accepted, 400 for bad request, etc.

This can be useful if you want to know if the URLs or sitemaps were submitted successfully to the IndexNow API.

Example of Status Code as Condition#

Before submitting all URLs, you can test if the first URL was submitted successfully and herafter continue with the rest of the URLs. A variation of previous examples:

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from index_now import submit_url_to_index_now, IndexNowAuthentication

authentication = IndexNowAuthentication(
    host="example.com",
    api_key="a1b2c3d4",
    api_key_location="https://example.com/a1b2c3d4.txt",
)

status_code = submit_url_to_index_now(authentication,
    "https://example.com/page1")

if status_code in [200, 202]:
    print("URL was submitted successfully to IndexNow.")
    print("Continuing with the rest of the URLs...")

    submit_url_to_index_now(authentication,
        "https://example.com/page2")
    submit_url_to_index_now(authentication,
        "https://example.com/page3")
else:
    print(f"Failure. No URL was submitted to IndexNow. Status code: {status_code}")

Overview of Status Codes#

According to the IndexNow API documentation, the following status codes are returned:

Typical Status Codes

Code Response  Description
200 OK  URL submitted successfully.
202 Accepted URL received. IndexNow key validation pending.
400 Bad request The request was invalid.
403 Forbidden In case of key not valid (e.g. key not found, file found but key not in the file).
422 Unprocessable entity In case of URLs which don’t belong to the host or the key is not matching the schema in the protocol.
429 Too many requests Too many requests (potential spam).

If you get 500 or similar as status code, it's likely that the server is experiencing an error. Then try again later.