New and updated content can now be discovered faster through Bing
Bing announced last week that it will now allow webmasters and site owners to publish 10,000 URLs a day to its index. The aim of this move is for Bing to eventually reduce the amount of crawling it has to do across a website, although it will be some years before this actually happens. The short term plan is to encourage you to use the URL submission tool to notify Bing of any new or updated content on your site which will then update the index in real time of this change. The long term plan is that every website will eventually do this when a content change happens, thus reducing the amount of crawling Bing has to do.
Although the announcement has been made, this is something still in its infancy at the moment and it will be up to content management systems to aid with this process – particularly on larger websites. Yoast have already announced something in the pipeline, see end of this article.
What to do Next?
As best practice, we would encourage webmasters to start submitting URLs to Bing where you have a new content piece or existing content has significantly. It could be particularly useful after updating blog content pieces or product guides.
How to access the Bing URL submission tool?
You can access the tool through your Bing Webmaster Tools account through the ‘configure my site section’ or utilising the submit URL API. If you don’t have an account, sign up here.
Limitations
In order to prevent spam, a quota based system has been developed. The older your Bing Verification is – the more URLs you are going to be able to submit daily. The limitations go from as low as 10 URL submissions a day if your site has a verification age of 1 day to 10000 submissions if the verification age is 180 days old. Find out about the Bing URL submission tool.
Yoast Announces Live Indexing Tool
In conjunction with this, the Yoast SEO plugin has announced a new live indexing feature which will be available in March 2019.