How To Get Your Site Indexed By Microsoft Bing

At the time of this posting, there is an ongoing thread at the Bing Webmaster Community forums titled “Why does Bing not index my site”. That thread is many pages long, and has a lot of different reasons why Bing has or has not indexed a particular page or site. I have noticed some of  the responses have been useful, and others not so much. In this post, I will try to layout some very simple tips to help a person get their site indexed by Bing.

For starters, please follow the simple tips in my SEO for Newbies post.  In that post, I go over very simple guidelines that apply to all the search engines. So once you have optimized your site with those simples tips, then you don’t have too much left to do. the next things you can do are the following:

1. Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools- sign up and verify your site with Bing, The bing Webmaster tools will help you get a good overview of how Bing sees your site, and allow you to tweak accordingly.

2. Submit your XML sitemap – Once you have registered with Bing Webmaster tools, submit your xml sitemap toBing through it. This will tell Bing where all of your urls are located and help the crawler parse them.

3. If your domain or site is new, stay away from ads and affiliate links for awhile – I know Google treats new domains and web pages with affiliate links and ads as suspicious initially. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bing did also as a way to fight search engine spam. In my opinion, a domain should be atleast a year old before one puts Google Adsense or any other affiliate links on their site. I think this is just for safe measure more than anything else.

4. Submit your site to free directories – There are a lot of free directories out there you can submit your site to. The biggest being The Open Directory Project and the Yahoo Directory.  You can try submitting your site to those directories. If you don’t get in, its no big deal as there are other free directories to submit to. You can add your site to many Free Directories to help you get a few back links. This is just to get your site out there.

5. Content is King – I can’t stress this enough. Content is the single most important part of your site. The more new and unique content you have on your site, the better off your site will be. If people like your content, they will link to it, if not, they won’t. This is the general rule of thumb on the web. I suggest just continue working on your content and it will come. As long as you continue to put up good content, you will be just fine.

6. Bing seems to encourage high quality outbound related links – In my experience, I have noticed Bing seems to encourage outbound links to content related to your web site as long as they are high quality. The more 5 Green bars on outbound links your site has, the more “non-spammy” Bing seems to see a web page or site. This is very unique, and to be frank, I love this idea from Bing. encouraging Webmasters to link to high quality content means Bing can produce a superior search experience.

After all of this, the best thing you can do is NOTHING. I am being serious. Bing will index you and rank you accordingly even though it may take some time. I personally think Bing is taking too much flack. The Bing engineering team has a lot on their plate right now considering their integration/deal with Yahoo  to replace the current Yahoo search with Bing, and various other things.

With that being said, just stay the course, work on your content, and it will come in time.