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
- 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 the URLs of the site in a XML file. 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 your site must be already added and verified under your account.
- Go to “Sitemaps” option available under “Configure My Site” tab.
- Enter your XML Sitemap or RSS feed URL and click on the “Submit” button.
Sitemap Submission in Bing Webmaster Tools
Once you submitted your Sitemap, it will appear in the same page instantly. 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 of the Sitemap will be shown as “Success” otherwise the crawl error will be shown. You can see the detailed crawl errors in “Crawl Information” section available under “Reports & Data” tab.
Crawl Information Details
Submit from Dashboard
You also have an option to submit your Sitemap directly from the “Dashboard”. Click on the “Submit a Sitemap” button available under “Sitemaps” section, enter your Sitemap URL and submit it.
Submit Sitemap from Dashboard
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.
The other option is to leave a reference of your Sitemap in Robots.txt file. This can be done by adding the below line in your Robots.txt file as shown below:
Robots.txt Sitemap Reference in Bing WMT
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.