Add Your Website to Bing Webmaster in 5 Easy Steps
Bing and Yahoo are among the popular search engines there are. While Google takes the lead in search engine industry, they follow.
Prior to 2009/2010, these two platforms had separate search engines. An agreement was reached, and it was concluded for them to merge using one algorithm developed by Bing.
So, if you submit your site to Bing, you are automatically doing so for Yahoo. Moreover, whatever pages are indexed by Bing, the same pages are indexed on Yahoo. Although the SERP interfaces are different, the search results are similar.
Unlike Google Search Console where all supported protocols must be submitted separately, you only need to submit one version of your site on Bing.
For new a site, it is highly recommended to manually submit the URLs of the site to Bing Webmaster Tools. This gives your site the chance to be seen by your target audience quicker. Do note that your web pages need to have at least one backlink before Bing will be able to find it.
The below 5 steps will guide you through the process of submitting your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and get it to appear on Bing / Yahoo search engines.
1. Adding your website to Bing / Yahoo
Adding a site to Bing is straight forward. You can either submit URL without registering for Bing Webmaster Tools account or do both.
Registering for Bing Webmaster Tools is highly recommended because it provides system for monitoring, analysing and receiving reports about all submitted sites.
To get started, open Bing Webmaster web page and input your site URL.
With this, the URL submitted will be crawled and indexed. If you stopped here, your site becomes limited. That means, you will not be able to analyse and get search reports for your site.
To get good performace for your site, proceed with the next steps.
2. Create Bing Webmaster Tools account
On submission of your URL through the above link, you will be redirected to this page. Click GREAT! SIGN ME UP, sign in and fill out the registeration form for the Webmaster account. When ready, click save at the bottom of the form.
If you already have Microsoft email account, you can use it to sign in. If not, register for one here.
3. Verify ownership of your site
When your registration is completed, you will be promted to verify the ownership of your site. You can do this in any of the three options provided by Bing. Follow your preferred option carefully and click verify at the bottom of the page when ready.
The first two options are the most commonly used. I will personally recommend using any of them.
Here is the 3rd options.
You should get this page after site ownership has been successfully verified.
If you are not sure about how to verify the ownership of your site, please refer to my detailed explanation in the section for How to Add A Website to Google Search Console. The steps are the same.
If after this, you still need more explanation, you can send me a message. I will be happy to help.
4. Submit a sitemap
Click on Configure My Site, Sitemaps, type in your site URL and click SUBMIT.
5. Fetch as Bingbot
Click on Diagnostics & Tools, Fetch as Bingbot, type in your site URL and click FETCH.
That is just about it. Now you have to wait for few days before all your web pages are indexed. It may take days or weeks before all your web pages are fully indexed. In my experience, it took just few hours before one of my sites was partially indexed. And the second took almost three weeks before a page was indexed.
Additional information
If you have more than one site, you can quickly add it to the Bing Webmaster Tools.
Click on My Sites. On the opened page, type in the new site URL and click ADD. The list of added sites will be displayed, then follow the above guide if you want better performance for the newly added site.
If you need help indexing your web pages on Bing, feel free to drop me a message. I can assist you in doing that.
