Complete Guide to Bing Webmaster Tools (Part 5, Getting Help & Support.)

We continue publishing the complete guide for webmasters who want to use Bing (and also Yandex) to index their content.

While Chrome leads the market with over 60% of the search results, the ability to add Bing can be especially important in certain markets where Microsoft's product captures user attention better.

Support for webmasters and site owners

There are separate sections in our help documentation, which you can access directly from the navigation pane on the left. It provides detailed information on our tools and features. However, we have found some common queries prevalent to using Bing Webmaster Tools, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link building, redirect management, 404 management, building sitemaps, etc.; Below is a list to cater to the same along with steps to self-diagnose and resolve. We encourage you to use these steps to save your time and get speedy resolutions on the issues faced.

We recommend going through the Bing Webmaster guidelines to get a comprehensive view of how Bing finds your webpages, processes it and ranks it.

Most popular queries.

› Why is my site not in the Bing index?
› Why is this URL not indexed by Bing?
› How can I submit URLs for Bing to crawl?
› How can I remove a URL from Bing?
› Why is Bing crawling my site too often?
› I am unable to verify my site on Webmaster Tools.
› Where can I get my site's verification code?
› Bing Webmaster portal has no search data for my website.
› How can I understand user behavior on my website?
Diagnose any URL or site level issues
Our diagnostic tools help you get faster resolutions to many issues. Click here to check them out.

If you still need further personal assistance, please contact us through our Support channel and we will reach out to you.

How do I report an issue with Bingbot?

Bingbot is the name of the crawler used by Bing to crawl or “spider” the web. It is Bingbot's job to find new and updated pages on websites across the internet, so that they can be processed for indexation. While crawling a website, Bingbot looks at robots.txt file for special instructions from website owners/webmasters. Bingbot honors robots.txt directives, including the crawl-delay: setting, and, in the absence of a crawl-delay, respects the input from webmasters in the Crawl Control feature.

Bingbot does a good job at determining how frequently it should visit pages on your site, taking robots.txt and Crawl Control rules and hints into consideration. We call this “Crawl Politeness”. There may still be cases where you feel Bingbot is not polite enough and visiting your pages more than it works for you (a case of overcrawling).

Report overcrawling.

Steps you can follow if you think Bingbot is overcrawling your site or not observing robots.txt rules:

Verify that the bot traffic you are seeing is in fact from a valid Bingbot server. You can do this by looking at the User-agent string (which can be easily spoofed by anyone) as well as the IP address. Use the Verify Bingbot tool to get a verification.
Once you verify that it is genuine Bingbot traffic, you can reduce crawler traffic using one of the following methods (3, 4 or 5, if you haven’t done so already).
Lower the crawl speed during busy hours using the Crawl Control feature.
Add a “crawl-delay:” directive to your robots.txt file. For example:
User-agent: Bingbot

Crawl-delay: 5

Crawl-delay limits the number of pages that Bingbot can crawl. It defines the period of time in small windows (1 to 20 seconds), during which Bingbot can crawl only one URL from your website. For example, if you set a crawl-delay of 5 (i.e., you give directive to crawl 1 URL in 5 seconds), Bingbot will be able to crawl 17280 URLs per day. If you increase the crawl-delay to 10, only 8640 URLs will be crawled. Higher the crawl-delay (highest being 20), lower is the number of pages crawled.

If you have followed step 1 and 2 and the issue is still present, you can contact Bing Webmaster Support. Fill out the required fields, and in the “What type of problem do you have?” dropdown, select “Crawling issue”. Under “What do you need help with?” dropdown select “Bing is crawling too much”, which offers an instant resolution of your issue. If you still have a question, toggle the button to "Yes", describe the problem, and click on “Get Help”. You can expect a reply within 24-48 hours. When you report overcrawling issues, the support team will ask you to provide server log samples that show Bingbot’s activity over a certain period of time in the next step, so make sure to keep those handy.

Source initial image / Fuente imagen inicial: Bing Webmaster Tools.

Source final image / Fuente imagen final: Global Stats Statcounter.