Common questions & solutions

A site’s homepage (the bare domain, with or without a trailing slash) is a special case for several engines. Each one decides whether to accept the homepage independently, so it’s normal to see a mix of Succeeded and Dead on the same URL across engines:

• Bing / IndexNow — accepts the homepage as long as the host matches the verified key file.
• Yandex / Seznam — generally accept the homepage without extra setup.
• Naver — frequently rejects the bare homepage with Invalid urls error.

The retry policy on Dead rows respects each engine’s rules, so fixing the underlying registration / verification will let future submissions go through cleanly without you having to re-queue old rows.

“Invalid urls” is what Naver returns when its API doesn’t recognise the destination as a property it’s allowed to accept submissions for. It is not a comment on the HTTP health of the URL — Naver doesn’t fetch it before responding.

Checklist:

1. The site is registered in Naver Search Advisor under the exact host you’re submitting (apex vs. www. matters).
2. Ownership is verified (HTML file or DNS TXT). Unverified properties always get Invalid urls.
3. The API key you stored in BetterIndexNow belongs to the same Naver account that owns that verified property.
4. The URL is under the verified host root — submitting a path from a different subdomain than the one verified will fail.

If you don’t plan to support Naver yet, you can disable it on the site’s Engines panel — those rows will stop being created and existing Dead rows can be ignored.

IndexNow requires every URL in a submission batch to share the same host as the key file. If your site emits both apex and www. URLs, the ones on the wrong host get marked Skipped with reason host_mismatch. Verify the other host as its own site and submissions will be routed correctly.

• blocked_by_robots — the URL’s robots.txt disallows our preflight user-agent.
• noindex — the page returned <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> or an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header.
• canonical_differs / canonical_other_host — the page’s <link rel="canonical"> points elsewhere, so submitting the original would waste crawl budget.
• bad_status — the origin returned a 4xx/5xx for our preflight fetch.
• host_mismatch — the URL’s host doesn’t match the site you registered.

Transient failures (network errors, 5xx, timeouts) get an automatic exponential-backoff retry up to the per-engine attempt cap. Permanent failures (4xx, the engine explicitly rejecting the URL) are terminal and not retried — you can re-queue them manually after fixing the underlying issue.

• Free — every 24 hours
• Pro — every 6 hours
• Agency — every 1 hour

On the first poll of a sitemap we record the URLs we found but don’t enqueue them — otherwise we’d submit the entire archive on day one and burn through your quota. From the next poll onwards, only URLs that newly appear are auto-submitted. You can manually queue any of the existing URLs from the site page if you want them pushed immediately.

One URL successfully delivered to one engine = one submission. Fanning the same URL out to four engines counts as four (one per engine). Preflight-skipped URLs are free.

We allow a small soft buffer, after which new submissions return HTTP 402 with an upgrade pointer. Reads (dashboard, audit log, exports) keep working, and existing in-flight submissions finish.

Email alerts (usage thresholds, webhook delivery failures) are included on Pro and Agency. On the Free plan the toggle is hidden because we don’t fire those emails. Upgrade to turn them on.