Bing has launched its first official plugin for WordPress aimed at helping site owners get their content indexed immediately.
Instead of waiting for a bingbot to crawl the site, the plugin notifies Bing of any new or updated content automatically using its Submit URL API.
Bing believes that the future for search engines is less about crawling to discover content and more about sharing new and updated content across the web, a fundamental shift in the way that search engines handle websites, Bing Product Manager Fabrice Canel said.
Instead of monitoring RSS, sitemaps, and HTML pages to check for new pages, discover content changes, and/or new outbound links, websites will notify search engines directly about relevant URLs changing on their website.
Search engines can take anywhere from several hours to a few weeks to crawl a website.
Bing’s API allows site owners to get content indexed immediately while eventually reducing the crawling frequency for sites where there are no changes.
Users will need to generate an API key in order to configure the plugin for access to the Bing Webmaster Tools API.
The new plugin also introduces a few other options for managing URL submissions:
- Toggle the automatic submission feature
- Manually submit a URL to Bing Index
- View list of recent URL submissions from the plugin
- Retry any failed submissions from the recent submissions list
- Download recent URL submissions for analysis
Canel said the Bing Webmaster Team recommends using the new URL Submissions plugin as a complement to existing plugins that connect sites to Bing, such as Jetpack’s site verification tool, and SEO plugins that add XML sitemaps.
Bing’s plugin is different in that it focuses on enabling Bing to discover immediate changes on WordPress sites.
Sitemaps are a great complementary solution to our plugin to discover all URLs on WordPress sites, but we cannot monitor each sitemap all the time, Canel said.
Only a small percentage of WordPress sites are publishing content every day. Most are nearly static and this is preferable to be notified instead of pulling content every so often for them.
Same for sites publishing often, it helps to get the content quickly indexed instead of having to wait a long time.
Bing doesn’t usually get as much airtime as Google and its supporting tools since Google continues to dominate the search market. Bings market share is currently hovering at 2.75% of searches globally on all platforms as of June 2020.
