Affiliate marketers: bulk-index large URL sets without burning your quota

Affiliate sites — comparison tables, deal aggregators, programmatic location pages — are a special case for indexing. You have thousands of URLs, most of which are slight variations of each other, and Google is aggressive about flagging them as duplicate or thin. Brute-force pushing everything is the wrong move.

The triage-first approach

1. Run the Status tab on a sample of 50-100 URLs (use the sitemap picker, sort randomly).
2. Bucket the results: Indexed, Crawled-not-indexed, Discovered-not-indexed, Not on Google.
3. If most are Indexed: your site quality is fine, push the remaining laggards.
4. If most are Crawled-not-indexed: you have a quality / duplicate-content problem. Stop pushing. Fix templates first.
5. If most are Discovered-not-indexed: push aggressively, this is exactly the case the Indexing API helps with.

Quota math for big sites

Google caps the Indexing API at 200 publish requests per 24h per Google Cloud project. IndexerNow's $9.99 pack is 50 credits. A $40/day budget gets you ~200 indexing requests, matching Google's hard ceiling. Beyond that, you're not getting more pushes — the API itself refuses.

What programmatic SEO sites should push

• Top-of-funnel hub pages and category roots first — they pass link equity to leaf URLs.
• Leaf URLs that are getting search traffic per Search Console (the cohort Google clearly likes).
• New URLs from the last 30 days that haven't been crawled yet.

What not to push

• Crawled-not-indexed URLs (won't help).
• Near-duplicate variants (probably make it worse — Google sees you spamming nearly identical URLs).
• URLs that 404 or redirect (Google files them under "Not found" if you push, costing you discovery slots).