Bing is a major search engine, only second behind Google, and ensuring your website is indexed on Bing is crucial for growing your business and getting more organic traffic. In this article, we’ll show you the quickest way to get indexed on Bing in 2024.
Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
We’re written a guide about setting up Bing Webmaster Tools and everything you can do with it, so we won’t go into too much detail here, but here’s a quick overview of the steps you need to take to get your site indexed on Bing.
1. Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account
Go to https://www.bing.com/webmasters and sign up for an account.
2. Add your site to your account
If you’ve already set up Google Search Console, you can import your site from there to Bing Webmaster Tools. If not, you will need to add it manually.
3. Verify your site
If you imported your site from Google Search Console, you don’t need to verify it again. If not, you will need to verify your site to prove that you own it.
You can do this 3 ways:
-
XML file upload - Download the XML verification file and upload it to your site’s root directory. Then click Verify.
-
HTML tag - Copy the HTML tag (e.g.
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="ABC123" />) and paste it into the<head>section of your site’s homepage. Then click Verify. -
CNAME record - Add the provided CNAME (alias) record to your DNS settings. Then click Verify.
Add a Robots.txt file
Bing uses the same robots.txt file as Google, so if you’ve already added one for Google, you don’t need to do anything. If not, you can add a robots.txt file to your site’s root directory to tell search engines which pages they can and can’t crawl. Here is an example of a robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://indexplease.com/sitemap-index.xml
Submit your sitemap
You can submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools to help Bing discover your pages. If you don’t have a sitemap, you can create one using one of many sitemap generators available online.
That’s it. If you don’t want to go through the tedious process of submitting all your URLs in your sitemap for indexing on Bing, you can sign up for IndexPlease and we’ll do it for you. We’ll also submit your pages for indexing on Google, Yandex, Naver and Seznam.