Submit a Sitemap to Bing

This is the second part of our series on adding your sitemap to search engines and will show you how you can submit a sitemap to Bing.

Giving you a better idea of which pages Bing has indexed. Including, reports like the search keywords report showing your rankings.

Before following this post make sure to complete the submit your sitemap to Google guide. Do this first so you can set up Bing using your Google account (Top tip: it's much faster that way!).

Once your domain name is set up in Google Search Console head to Bing Webmaster Tools to get started.

If for some reason you can't set up Google first then see the manual steps to submit your sitemap URL to Bing.

Getting Started

When you first visit Bing Webmaster Tools you will need to log in. They have a few options you can choose Microsoft, Google or Facebook.

Now that you have Google Search Console set up login using your Google account.

Once logged in you will see the Webmaster Tools dashboard. Where you have two options to get started:

• Add a site using your sites URL
• Import a site using Google Search Console

It is much easier to use the import option. Select this and a screen shows details of the connection required to connect Bing to Google:

Now, do you remember setting up the DNS TXT record for Google? This was to verify that you own the domain. By connecting Bing to Google we can verify ownership because Bing trusts Google. This makes it much easier as you don't have to go through any more verification steps with Bing.

You do need to give Bing some view-only permissions to your Search Console account to do this. They use this permission to confirm your domain verification and update sitemaps.

If you're not happy with this sharing of data then you can always follow the manual steps. Yet, they do make it clear that they will not import any analytics from your Search Console account.

This is what Bing will import from your Search Console account:

We will only import the list of your verified sites and their sitemaps. After importing, you can choose which sites you want to add to Bing Webmaster Tools. We will not be importing any site analytics related data from your Search Console account.

Once you are happy with this select the “Continue to Search Console” button. This will open up a Google permission window. Here you need to allow the permission change to continue.

Once you press the “Allow” button you will see a list of sites that you can import into Bing. These are the same sites that you have in your Search Console account.

To import them select the checkbox next to the sites that you want to import and press the “Import” button.

You will then see a “Congratulations” screen. Press the “Done” button to close this window.

You will now be back at the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard and you will see a list of sites that you have imported:

Select one of the sites you have added and you will see that the sitemap is pending:

This takes about 5 mins depending on the size of your sitemap. Once Bing has read the sitemap you will see it update like this:

That is all there is to it! Adding your site to Bing is much easier when you connect to Google Search Console.

Yet, if you can't connect it or you had trouble using the import method it is possible to add the site on your own. Let's look at this next.

Add a Site - Manual Verification

To add the site using manual verification go back to the main dashboard. This time type the website URL into the “Add a site” box and click “Add”:

The next screen you will see asks you to add some extra information. The most important being the URL of your sitemap.

In the Google Search Console tutorial, we talked about how best to find the sitemap of your website.

This is the same for Bing. You need to locate your robots.txt file which you can find by adding /robots.txt to your website URL.

For example, PageDart's robots.txt file is here:

https://pagedart.com/robots.txt

And looks like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://pagedart.com/sitemap.xml

This gives the location of the sitemap and this is what we need to give to Bing.

Remember, sitemaps are not always found in the same location. If you have trouble finding yours make sure to check out this helpful guide on finding your sitemap.

Once you have the URL enter it into the sitemap text field like this:

You are also asked when your site receives the most traffic, leave this as default and click “Add”.

The next screen lists three ways that you can verify your website:

• Add an XML file to your website
• Add a meta tag to the HTML on your homepage
• Add a CNAME record to your DNS

Let's look at each of these and what you need to do.

XML

For the XML file follow the instructions provided below, you need to download the file. Then upload this to your website. This file needs to be at the root of your site this means after the slash.

1. Download BingSiteAuth.xml from the Bing page
2. Upload the file to http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml
3. Confirm successful upload by visiting http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml in your browser
4. Click the verify button below

Once you have followed these steps jump back to the Webmaster Tools and click verify.

If you cannot upload a file to your site then look at the next option a meta tag.

Meta

A meta tag is a special tag that you place between the head tags on your website. A meta tag allows you to add values to your page that are not visible to your users. Yet, web crawlers like Bingbot use these tags to get more information about the page.

To verify using this method you need to add a meta tag with a value given to you by Bing. Bingbot can then check to make sure you have access to the site.

In this example, I was asked to add this meta tag:

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="AE7245A2684B6FAD1CB6AA965BC71DD0" />

It is worth mentioning that the content will be different for your meta tag. Mine is "AE7245A2684B6FAD1CB6AA965BC71DD0" but yours will be different. Add the meta tag to your HTML like this:

<html>
	<head>
		<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="AE7245A2684B6FAD1CB6AA965BC71DD0" />
		<title>Your SEO optimized title</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		page contents
	</body>
</html>

This is the easiest option for WordPress users. Install the Meta Tag Manager Plugin and you can create custom meta tags on any page.

Once added to your page go back to the Bing Webmaster Tools and click the verify button.

If you can't add a meta tag to your site you still have one more option. You can add a DNS record.

DNS

Adding a DNS record is the same process that we followed in the Google Search Console setup. Here you are verifying ownership of the website by adding a CNAME DNS record.

This is different depending on who you registered your domain with. Bing offers instructions for popular domain registrars:

If yours is on the list then great click on it and follow the instructions. If not, you will have to do this on your own. But, don't worry let's walk through it.

In the screenshot above you can see that Bing is asking you to create a CNAME with these values:

• Type - CNAME
• Name - c529de2eba048fffef90e10850187246
• Value - verify.bing.com

I use Netlify to manage my DNS so here is the DNS CNAME record that I created:

I have taken the values from Bing and created the record. Once you have made the change you can go back to Bing Webmaster Tools and click verify.

You might find you see this message:

With DNS the changes will not be instant, so this is another one of those coffee moments! Grab one and come back in 5 minutes then try again.

It can take up to 24 hours for DNS to update itself so don't worry if it's not instant.

Once it is all set up you will see a message like this:

Your sitemap is now submitted to Bing!

Wrapping Up, Submit a Sitemap to Bing

Today, we have learned how you can submit a sitemap to bing. To do this you need to use the Bing Webmaster Tools.

This is a free site that you can log in to and submit your sitemap. Giving you access to reports like:

• page traffic report
• crawl information report

The easiest way to set up Bing Webmaster Tools is to use your Google account. So make sure that you have submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console.

Once you have come back to Bing and import the sitemap for your Search Console account.

If you can't do this then you can still do manual verification by using one of the methods:

• add an XML file to your website
• add a meta tag inside the head tag of your homepage
• add a CNAME DNS record using your DNS provider

Whichever way you have gone you now have your sitemap in Bing, congrats!