How to get your Ghost blog indexed on Bing in 2025

Bing isn’t just another search engine. With 15% global search market share and deeper integration into Windows Copilot AI and Edge’s default search, Bing drives 20% of organic traffic for publishers targeting tech oriented audiences. Hence, Bing has a staggering amount of users and sits in second place as the most used search engine, meaning that unlike Google, they also have millions of users who search blogs on a daily basis. Yet Ghost users often report 30–60 day delays in Bing indexing compared to Google.

Without your blog being indexed on Bing, you are not capitalizing on a large volume of traffic that is essentially free. Every single one of us understands the logic that if your blog has more traffic, it is most likely popular. This is why you would want to ensure that your Ghost blog gets indexed on Bing, this way the traffic directed to your blog will increase.

Bing’s crawler, Bingbot, prioritizes technical precision and fast rendering pages. Ghost’s minimalist architecture, while SEO friendly, lacks native tools for Bing specific signals like IndexNow automation or dynamic sitemap optimization.

1. What is indexing?

Search engines crawl your blog, analyze it and store the information to use later. The better your blog is indexed, the more chances it has of showing up in relevant search engine results, meaning there will be more potential visitors and consequently more organic traffic to your blog.

Set Up Core Signals in Ghost

Before Bingbot even discovers your site, ensure these fundamentals:

1. HTTPS Enforcement: Bing’s 2025 Webmaster Guidelines explicitly penalize mixed content. Ghost makes this easy:

• Navigate to Settings > General > Enable SSL and force HTTPS.
• Use “Why No Padlock?” (free tool) to detect insecure elements.

2. Slug Optimization: Bing favors URLs with clear intent. Avoid auto generated slugs like /post-3/.

• Edit slugs to include primary keywords (e.g., /bing-seo-2025/).
• Link to IndexPlease’s guide: Clean URLs & Why They Matter.

3. Canonical Tags: Ghost auto generates canonicals.

2. Build a Bing Friendly XML Sitemap

Ghost’s default sitemap (/sitemap.xml) lacks lastmod timestamps and splits posts/page archives awkwardly.

1. Add lastmod:
2. javascript
3. Copy
4. Download

// In Ghost's theme, modify the sitemap template:
{{#foreach posts}}
  <url>
    <loc>{{url absolute="true"}}</loc>
    <lastmod>{{updated_at format="YYYY-MM-DD"}}</lastmod>
  </url>
{{/foreach}}

5. Split Large Sitemaps: Bing processes sitemaps faster under 10,000 URLs. Use sitemap-index files for multi author blogs.

Submit your sitemap

After drafting the XML sitemap, the next stage involves submitting it to Bing Search Console. Thankfully, there is a guide that details the procedure on how to set up the Bing Search Console to submit the sitemap, and you can consider yourself fortunate. You can find it here.

Submit your pages

With Bing, you have two options after submitting your sitemap. You can either sit back and wait for the automated crawl of your pages or submit them through manual methods. The manual option consists of logging into Bing Search Console and submitting each URL one at a time. For larger sites, this can become a long and frustrating task and there’s no assurance those URLs will be indexed. However, if you’re prepared to take this manual approach, we have prepared a comprehensive step-by-step guide for submitting your pages to Bing.

3. Optimize Render & Crawl Budget

Bingbot uses Chromium for rendering but allocates a crawl budget conservatively.

1. Core Web Vitals:

• Aim for LCP < 2.5s. Ghost’s default themes often score 90+ on Lighthouse, but third-party apps can bloat performance.

2. Unblock CSS/JS: Avoid disallowing /assets/ in robots.txt. Bingbot needs these to render pages accurately.
3. Test with Bing Bot IPs: Use Bing’s Verified Bot List to simulate crawls.

4. Automate Bing Discovery with IndexNow

IndexNow (adopted by 55% of Bing-indexed sites in 2024) notifies Bing of updates within seconds. Ghost lacks native integration, but here’s a workaround:

1. Generate an API Key:

• Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Navigate to Config > IndexNow to get your key.

2. Manual API Calls:
3. bash
4. Copy
5. Download
6. curl -d "{"host": "yourdomain.com", "key": "your_key", "urlList": ["https://yourdomain.com/new-post"]}" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow

Automatically index your pages

As of now, every Ghost user needs to know how to get their blog indexed on Bing because it is a crucial step for attracting organic traffic to the blog. Readers will find your blog if it is indexed or listed on the search engine results. To get your blog indexed, you have to create an XML sitemap and then separately submit every single page. This process can be quite troublesome when dealing with larger blogs as it is too time consuming and unreliable. IndexPlease comes in to simplify the workload. For bulk submissions (up to 10,000 URLs/day), IndexPlease automates IndexNow API calls and retries failed pings. For only $7 a month, IndexPlease allows up to 400 pages a day to be submitted for indexing on 5 different platforms which include Google and Yandex. The content is guaranteed to be indexed within 48 hours, which gives you peace of mind when focusing on other tasks.

FAQs

1. Why is indexing my Ghost blog on Bing important?

Bing is the second most popular searching engine which makes it crucial for other readers to find your blog. Having your blog indexed in Bing ensures that it is available in the relevant searching results which can tremendously increase the amount of organic traffic you receive. Without the indexing, discovering your blog is impossible and leads to missed chances for growth.

2. How do I create an XML sitemap for my Ghost blog?

An XML sitemap has been created for your ghost blog and can be found at https://yourghostblog.com/sitemap.xml. This sitemap contains a listing of every single page that is published on your blog and enables search engines to index your content effortlessly.

3. Where do I go to submit my sitemap on Bing Search Console?

Publishing the sitemap is one step away after creating it and the final step would be submitting it to the Bing Search Console. For this, you may refer to our detailed guide.

4. What is the approximate time for Bing to Index my blog after submitting the sitemap?

When your sitemap is submitted, be prepared to wait at least weeks if not more for Bing to get to your pages and crawl them and index them. This may vary on the timetable of Bing’s crawling system. This isn’t always guaranteed and could take a lot of time. Alternatively, you can submit pages one by one manually but this could be tedious and requires extra work if there are many posts.

5. Why do posts appear on Google but not Bing?

Bingbot crawls slower. Use IndexNow and submit URLs manually via Bing Webmaster Tools.

6. Does Bing care about AMP in 2025? No. Bing deprecated AMP support in 2024, favoring Core Web Vitals.

7. How to block tag archives without hurting SEO?

Add noindex meta tags to Ghost’s tag template (tag.hbs).

8. Does Bing index Ghost’s membership only content?

Only if you allow Bingbot in Settings > Members > Access.

9. How often should I resubmit old posts?

Only if content changes. Use IndexPlease’s “Recrawl Request” feature for critical updates.

Final Thoughts

Bing’s AI-driven answers and default Windows traffic make it a significant but understated contributor to revenue. By optimizing technical signals, automating IndexNow and streamlining crawl efficiency, Ghost blogs can dominate Bing’s SERPs in 2025. So, to skip the manual grind, IndexPlease will handle sitemap pings, IndexNow automation and crawl monitoring, so you can focus on creating content.