Bing Webmaster Tools API Missing A Week Of Data
The Bing Webmaster Tools API might have a week of data loss, a data gap, if you will. There was some sort of issue where the API was not returning data after March 3rd and then after Glenn Gabe reported it to Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel, Microsoft fixed…
Bing Webmaster Tools Adding Bing Chat & Index Coverage Reporting
Yesterday, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing announced at PubCon that Bing Webmaster Tools would get two new features. First is the Bing Chat integration, and the second is the index coverage report.
Microsoft Bing Updates Webmaster Guidelines: Conversation Mode and Bing Image Creator
Microsoft has updated the Bing webmaster guidelines to support the updates with the new co-pilot, AI, ChatGPT-powered version of Bing. Bing updated the answers section and added a new section for “conversation mode and Bing image creator.”
Is The New BingBot Now Fully Live Today For Microsoft Bing?
As a reminder, since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. It should have rolled out to 100% of all crawls last month. But now Fabrice Canel said this week that …
Microsoft Bing: lastmod Tag In XML Sitemap File Is Critical
Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on t…
Possible Bing Algorithm Update On Wednesday, January 18th
There was a possible Bing algorithm update that rolled out on January 18, 2023 that’s impacting some sites heavily.
Bing Will Fully Switch To The New BingBot User Agent In Early January
Since April, Bing has been slowly testing a new BingBot user agent, slowly rolling it out to more percentages of crawls over the year. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said while the new BingBot is still only doing 50% of all crawls, it will move to 100% …
Bing Webmaster Tools To Undergo Maintenance Today Between 10 and 1pm ET
Bing Webmaster Tools will undergo scheduled maintenance between 10am and 1pm ET today. The Microsoft Bing Search toolset posted this notice at the top of the tool when you login today.
Microsoft: Half Of Bing Crawls Are New BingBot User Agent
Fabrice Canel updated us the other day that now half of all crawling Microsoft Bing does is over the new BingBot user agent. About a month ago, it was 20%, then two months prior to that it was 5%.
Bing Discovers 12s Of Billions Of URLs It’s Never Seen Before Every Day
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said that each day Bing discovers 12s of billions of normalized URLs never seen before. That is a lot of new URLs for BingBot to find in a single day, don’t you think?
IndexNow Is Growing But Should You Pay Attention?
Microsoft’s IndexNow protocol is growing and the search company keeps investing in it, despite Google not adopting it – yet. Microsoft said that more than 16 million websites are publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API.
Microsoft: 5% Of BingBot Crawls Are New BingBot
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said on Twitter last night that 5% of all URLs downloaded are over the new BingBot user agent. To take you back, in April, Bing announced a new user agent for its crawler, BingBot.
IndexNow Coming To Yoast SEO Premium
Despite Yoast’s founder, Joost de Valk, being super unimpressed with IndexNow, the Microsoft backed indexing initiative, Yoast will be adding support soon for IndexNow in Yoast SEO Premium.
Spammers Ruined Bing’s Anonymous Sitemap Submissions, Microsoft Deprecated It
On Friday, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced Bing has deprecated the anonymous sitemap submission method. Bing will no longer accept Sitemap submissions through HTTP requests.
Bing SEO: Subscription-Based & Paywall Content
Fabrice Canel posted an SEO best practices post for sites that use subscription-based and paywall content. While Google has something called flexible sampling, previously a first click free program – Microsoft Bing does not.
Old BingBot User-Agent To Stop Being Used In Fall 2022
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing announced on the Bing blog that the search company will retire the legacy BingBot user-agent in the Fall of 2022. Instead, Bing will use a user-agent that is more representative of its evergreen BingBot rendering engi…
Bing Doesn’t Support data-nosnippet HTML Attribute
While Google supports the data-nosnippet HTML attribute, Microsoft Bing does not, clarified Fabrice Canel of Microsoft on Twitter. The data-nosnippet attribute lets you designate textual parts of an HTML page not to be used as a snippet in the search …
Yoast Founder: IndexNow Doesn’t Lead To More Traffic Or Improved Crawl Efficiency
Some of you may be wondering why Yoast or WordPress have not integrated the Microsoft backed IndexNow protocol. Well, Joost de Valk, the founded of Yoast said he has seen zero evidence that IndexNow helps sites gain more traffic or reduces crawling or…
Bing News PubHub Moved To Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft Bing has moved the Bing News PubHub to within Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing News PubHub is a way for publishers to submit their site for approval in Bing News and also check on the status of their approval. It is no longer available at pubhub…
IndexNow WordPress Plugin Released By Microsoft Bing
Our friends at Microsoft Bing released a holiday gift over Christmas, the IndexNow WordPress plugin. If you run your site on WordPress, you can easily click a few buttons to add IndexNow support to your site and get instant indexing from Bing and Yand…