After thorough beta testing, the Bing Content Submission API is now available to everyone. The tool notifies Bing when changes are made to a website.
Bing launched its Bing Content Submission API in beta mode earlier this year. The API allows you to notify Bing about changes to your site content in real-time.
Fabrice Canal, Principal Program Manager at Bing, tells us one of the reasons for rolling this out is so the search engine can become less dependent on Bingbot moving forward.
“With an overwhelming response and great feedbacks from website owners who had adopted the API, we are pleased to announce that Bing Content Submission API is now open for all to implement and to start sending their content changes to Bing, not only to reach more relevant users on Bing but also to reduce bingbot crawl load on their sites.”
When used in combination with the Bing URL Submissions API, this tool will offer more flexibility with regard to sending updated content and URLs to Bing as soon as it goes live.
Searchers will then see the updated content immediately.
Using the URL Submission API and Content Submission API together will grant access to a unified dashboard, where you can find indexing stats and latency data for your submissions.
Bing also promises the “ability to ramp-up traffic from hundreds to millions of web pages with lesser dependency on organic crawling.”
Here’s how to get started with the new Content Submission API.
How to Use the Bing Content Submission API
Step 1: Verify Your Site With Bing Webmaster Tools
In order to use the Content Submission API you’ll first need to verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already.
It’s like Google Search Console, but for Bing search insights. It comes with a whole host of features in addition to API access.
Step 2: Generate an API Key
Using any of Bing’s Webmaster APIs requires an API key. A key can be generated from Bing Webmaster Tools with these steps:
- Sign into Bing Webmaster Tools
- Click on Settings on the top right corner
- Go to the API Access section.
- Click on the “Generate API Key” button.
Step 3: Integrate Content Submission API Into Your Website
The only thing left to do is integrate the API key with you website and begin submitting content to Bing.
There’s multiple ways you can do that, which Bing lays out in its setup guide.
Additional Information
Bing notes that this tool is still a work in progress and adjustments could be made based on user feedback.
“We are excited to public the API to our users and we are here listening to your feedback. We will continue to learn and improve at larger scale and adjust crawl rates for sites implementing the API, so as to give maximum benefit in terms of not only indexation but also crawl load management and freshness of the content to searchers.”
To be clear, Bing is not phasing out the use of Bingbot for content indexing. Whether you want to use the Content Submission API is completely optional.
If you do nothing, your content will continue to get crawled and indexed by Bing. It just may not happen as fast as it would with the API.
Source: Bing
Featured image: monticello / Shutterstock
