“Bing Webmaster Tools has introduced a new feature to improve sitemap reporting, providing more insights on site indexing. This tool can help identify and fix index coverage issues, ensuring comprehensive and relevant sitemaps for better website performance.”
Revolutionizing Sitemap Reporting with Bing Webmaster Tools
Exciting enhancements have been introduced to Bing Webmaster Tools’ sitemap reporting capabilities. These updates offer webmasters greater insights into how their sites are indexed by Bing.
What’s New in Sitemap Features?
Among the new features, Bing now provides a page showing all submitted and organically discovered sitemaps for your site. This includes submission dates, status, last crawl date, number of URLs discovered, and a link to Index Coverage when available. Bing also reports a breakdown of URLs indexing status for URLs indexed and those requiring attention.
“We report a breakdown of URLs indexing status for URLs indexed and URLs which need attention from sitemaps and sitemap index files.”
Improving Your Site’s Index Coverage
The new sitemap feature can help improve your site’s index coverage. First, ensure Bing is informed about all relevant sitemaps associated with your website. If any are missing, submit them to Bing or reference them in your robots.txt file. Second, identify and fix any issues in your sitemaps. Lastly, investigate why URLs listed in your sitemaps are not indexed.
“Investigate why URLs listed in your sitemaps are not indexed by looking at URLs which need attention.”
Benefitting from the New Sitemap Index Coverage Report
The Sitemap Index Coverage report reveals how many pages from your sitemap(s) are indexed by Bing, how many are excluded, and why. The report provides a summary of the sitemap’s index coverage, including the total number of pages indexed and not indexed. You can also see a breakdown of the exclusion reasons.
Consider removing unnecessary or outdated URLs from your sitemaps. The best sitemaps list only all relevant valid URLs from your websites and should be refreshed at least once a day. Pay special attention to the lastmod attribute to help all search engines throttling crawlers.
From the Bing Blogs