How to Submit Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing is the search engine commonly used by Bing search and Yahoo! search. Submitting your Sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools account is the simple and easy way to tell Bing search engine about the structure of your site. This helps Bingbot to crawl and index your site’s pages and show it in the Bing and Yahoo! search results appropriately.

Formats of Sitemap Accepted by Bing

Bing accepts the following four Sitemap formats:

XML Sitemap
RSS 2.0
mRSS (Media RSS)
Atom 0.3 & 1.0
Text file containing URLs of your site per line

XML Sitemap is normally used for the content site which contains all URLs of the site in a XML file format. Whereas RSS or Atom feeds are used for submitting blog feed in which the content is updated more frequently through a blog posts. The submitted URL of the Sitemap should remain same even though the site or blog can be added with more pages or posts.

How to Submit a Sitemap to Bing?

Following are the step by step process of submitting your Sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools account:

Login to your Bing Webmaster Tools account and select the site you want to submit a Sitemap. In order to add a Sitemap, you must have already added and verified your site.
Go to “Sitemaps” option available from the sidebar.
Click on the “Submit sitemap” button showing on top right corner.

Submit Sitemap Option in Bing Webmaster Tools

Enter your XML Sitemap or RSS feed URL and click on the “Submit” button.

Once you submitted your Sitemap, it will appear in the same page instantly with the status as “Processing”. You can select the Sitemap and resubmit it or delete it if not needed.

It may take up to one day for Bing to crawl the first time submitted Sitemap and then the Sitemap is crawled every day. If the crawling of your Sitemap is success then the status will be changed to “Success”. Otherwise, you can go to “Sitemaps with errors” or “Sitemaps with warnings” to find the crawl errors. After fixing the error, Bing will automatically process your Sitemap or you can manually resubmit it again.

Note: XML Sitemap should get dynamically updated whenever you change or add URL in your site. Otherwise, URLs in your Sitemap and the real site may not match and results in error status. You can also submit a text file as a Sitemap containing all the URLs in your site. Ensure one URL is entered per line in the text file. In this case, you need to manually resubmit the updated file whenever adding a new page to your site.

Submit from Home Section

If you have added the site newly, it will take up to 48 hours for Bing to process the collected data and show in the relevant sections. In this case, you will see a notification in “Home” section along with additional inputs under “Get started with” section. From there, you can click on the “Sitemaps” option and submit your Sitemap to Bing same way as explained above.

Importing Sitemaps from Google Search Console

When adding your site to Bing Webmaster Tools account, you have an option to import the data from Google Search Console by connecting with your Google account. In this case, all Sitemaps submitted in Google Search Console for that site will be imported to Bing Webmaster Tools and processed automatically.

Adding Sitemap Location in Robots.txt File

The other option is to leave a reference of your Sitemap in Robots.txt file for easier crawling. This can be done by adding the below line in your Robots.txt file. This is also useful when you have multiple Sitemaps and they are located in different locations other than the root directory of your site.

Sitemap: https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Using IndexNow API

You can use IndexNow API to automatically submit new and modified pages to Bing. In addition to Bing, Yandex also use IndexNow to collect the details. So, this will be useful to get your pages quickly indexed in multiple search engines. You have the following options for settings up IndexNow: