If you have never taken any notice of Bingbot – now is the time.
Bing’s search engine has been steadily growing in popularity over the last 10 years.
It has become the sleeping giant of the SEO world. Bing SEO is now an important consideration for all SEOs.
In this blog, I will share everything you need to know about Bingbot and how to take advantage of it to boost your SEO results.
What Will I Learn?
Bingbot is a web crawler created by Bing. It’s what powers the search engine and if you want to rank high in the Bing SERPs – You need to learn about it.
Bingbot functions very similarly to Googlebot. There are a few details that differentiate them but for the most part they both:
Most web crawlers are very similar. That even includes bots from SEO tools like Semrushbot, GPTBot and Ahrefsbot.
If you optimise your website for Google you are 90% of the way there. But the last 10% is what will give you an edge over your competitors.
Bingbot works by following links all over the web and discovering new pages and new sites. It processes those links and organises the sites that it finds to use the information to answer people’s search queries.
Bingbot works in three important stages:
Why should you care about this?
Two words: Competitive advantage.
Learning about Bingbot can help you leverage it for better rankings, but more on this later.
Search engine user agents just refer to the type of bot and the role that it has.
A user agent is like an identifying number to say it is Bingbot who is requesting a version of your site.
It will leave behind a user agent string so you can identify:
For example, a search engine may have different user agents to crawl and understand site links vs crawling and understanding images.
Bingbot has 3 main user agents to power their entire search engine:
Bingbot’s predecessor was called MSNBOT. Sometimes you will still see the name MSNBOT in your server log when it crawls your website.
Bing has a growing user base online.
While it doesn’t have nearly as big of a “search engine market share” as Google does, ranking in Bing has a number of benefits for your SEO.
This is obvious but so many SEO’s overlook it.
You want to make sure that your website is optimised for Bingbot so it can easily find and index all of your content.
Think of Bingbot like the person in the accounting department that pays the wages – being on good terms with them means you get paid on time, every time.
I’ve had clients sites that were making a lot of money just from Bing organic search traffic.
My own website gets a good amount of visitors each month from Bing alone.
Optimising your website for Bingbot can significantly increase your search traffic…
…And Bing traffic is just as good as Google traffic. It is still very targeted and high quality which can lead to a significant increase in leads and sales.
By the way… don’t forget to monitor your Bing rankings with Bing rank tracker tools.
Simply put: The more usable that Bingbot finds your site, the higher you will rank.
You need to make sure that Bingbot can easily understand your site pages and that they feature high-quality content worth extracting.
Focus on these four on-page SEO factors:
These four ranking factors are what will give you an edge in the search results.
To learn more about ranking in Bing check out my complete Bing SEO guide.
If you see what appears to be Bingbot traffic on your site server logs, there is an easy way to really verify that it is Bingbot.
In most cases, Bingbot will appear as”Bingbot” or “MSNBOT” in your server logs.
To verify that this is genuinely Bingbot, you can use Bing’s free IP address verification tool.
Head over to the Verify Bingbot tool and enter the IP address that you want to check.
Then, click submit and it will give you the verdict.
Easy as that! You can quickly see if it is Bingbot and take any appropriate measurements.
Want to block Bingbot from your website?
There are two methods:
Here’s how to do them both.
Bingbot follows robots.txt rules.
So the easiest way to block it is by adding a disallow tag to your robots.txt file.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your robots.txt file:
User-agency: Bingbot
Disallow: /
That’s it! Bingbot should follow the robots.txt rules you set up.
Be aware that it can take some time for it to discover the new robots.txt rule.
The problem with robots.txt is that you are relying on Bingbot to do the right thing and follow your directions.
With .htaccess the control is back in your hands.
To block Bingbot add the following code at the end of your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ‘bingbot|MSNbot’
RewriteRule . * – [F,L]
This is will do the trick and keep Bingbot off your website for good.
Want to block Bingbot from crawling certain web pages only?
To block Bing from visiting entire pages without stoping it from the whole website simply copy and paste the following code into the page header:
<meta name=”bingbot” content=”noindex”>
That’s it! Bingbot will not add that specific page to its index and it won’t be shown in the Bing search results.
Bingbot has become an important search engine bot for SEOs to understand and it will only continue to grow.
Taking advantage of Bingbot now gives you an edge over your competitors in the search results. Who wouldn’t like that?
Remember:
Although Bing may not be as big as Google, the organic traffic is just as valuable. Follow the steps above and leverage Bingbot to grow your site’s traffic.
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