Blog / seo wednesday
Should You Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools?
Bing Webmaster Tools takes a few minutes to set up, and IndexNow can tell several search engines about a new page the moment you publish it.
Almost every small-business site we host gets most of its search traffic from Google, so that is where owners put their attention. Reasonable. But the setup for the other engines takes a few minutes once, and one piece of it is worth doing even if you never log in to Bing again. That is this week's SEO Wednesday: a short job you can finish before lunch.
What you get from Bing's side
Bing runs its own crawler and its own index. That means the data it shows you is independent of anything in Google Search Console: different queries, different click counts, its own view of which of your pages it has crawled and which it skipped.
For the sites we look after, Bing is usually a small slice of total search traffic. Small is not zero, though, and the reports are free. The part we find most useful is the crawl information. If Bing's crawler is hitting errors on your site, there is a decent chance Google's is too, and a second opinion on that costs you nothing.
Setting it up without repeating verification
If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, use the import option. You connect your Search Console account, pick the sites you want, and Bing verifies them for you and pulls their sitemaps across at the same time. No meta tag, no file upload. You can bring in up to 100 sites in one go, and a single Bing account holds up to 1,000.
Two things to know. Traffic data for a newly imported site can take up to 48 hours to appear, so do not panic at an empty report on day one. And Bing keeps checking ownership against Search Console: if you later revoke its access, you will need to verify the site another way, with a meta tag or a DNS record.
If you do not use Search Console, the DNS route is the one we usually recommend, because it survives theme changes and site rebuilds. Add the record Bing gives you in cPanel's Zone Editor, wait for it to propagate, then confirm. Either way, finish by checking that your sitemap is listed. We wrote about keeping a sitemap honest on a small site a while back and the same rules apply here.
IndexNow: the part actually worth doing
IndexNow is a small protocol with a simple idea. Instead of waiting for a crawler to come back and notice your change, your site sends the URL the moment you publish, update or delete a page.
The IndexNow site lists endpoints for Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Amazon and Yep, plus a shared endpoint that passes your submission on to the rest. Google is not on that list, so none of this replaces the work you already do for Google.
The mechanics are straightforward:
- Generate a key of 8 to 128 characters. A random hex string is fine.
- Save a text file at your site root named after the key, containing only the key, so
yourkey.txtloads and showsyourkeyand nothing else. - Send the URL to an IndexNow endpoint when content changes. One POST can carry up to 10,000 URLs.
Most WordPress SEO plugins have an IndexNow option in their settings, which is the easiest path if you are already running one. If you are deciding between the two we see most often, our notes on Yoast and Rank Math cover the differences. Anything custom can call the endpoint from a publish hook in a few lines.
One operational note from the spec, because people get this wrong: every URL you submit counts against your site's crawl quota, and engines will answer with HTTP 429 and a Retry-After header if you push too hard. Submit pages that genuinely changed. Firing your whole sitemap at it every night is wasted effort at best.
What it will not do
Submitting a URL does not mean it gets indexed. The IndexNow documentation says so plainly, and so does Bing: crawl scheduling and quality signals still decide, and each engine makes its own call. A thin page, a near-duplicate, or a page buried with no internal links pointing at it will be ignored just as fast as before, only sooner.
It also will not fix anything on the server side. Slow responses and redirect chains cost you crawling, and an expired certificate costs you more than that. A ping helps with none of it. If your hosting is where the delay is coming from, that is the thing to fix first.
So: set up Bing's tools once, wire up IndexNow, then go back to the work that actually moves rankings. If you want a hand checking that your key file is reachable or that a DNS verification record went in correctly, open a ticket with our support team and we will look at it with you.