On This Page: [hide]
Bing becomes yet another company to release an official plugin for WordPress – Bing URL’s Submission API. The plugin’s purpose is to help site owners get their content indexed as soon as possible. The plugin works by notifying the Bing search engine of new or updated content rather than waiting for a bot to crawl the website. This is done automatically by using Bing’s Submit URL API.
According to Bing Product Manager Fabrice Canel, “Bing believes that the future for search engines is less about crawling to discover content and more about sharing new and updated content across the web, a fundamental shift in the way that search engines handle web sites.”
Instead of monitoring RSS, sitemaps and HTML pages to check for new pages, discover content changes and/or new outbound links, websites will notify search engines directly about relevant URLs changing on their website, Canel added.
How Does the Official Bing URL Submission Plugin Work?
The first step is to generate an API key which is needed to configure the plugin for access to the Bing Webmaster Tools API. Bing’s API helps site owners to get their content indexed instantly, while also reducing the crawling frequency for sites with no changes.
Several other options are also included in the Bing URL Submission Plugin, such as the option to toggle the automatic submission feature, and manually submitting a URL to Bing Index. Other features include viewing a list of recent URL submissions from the plugin itself, retrying failed submissions using the recent list, and downloading the recent list for analytical purposes.
In Canel’s words, the new URL Submissions plugin should be used as a complement to existing plugins that connect sites to Bing. Bing’s plugin is focused on enabling the search engine to discover immediate changes on WordPress websites.
If you’re an owner of a new WordPress website, we recommend you have a look at these useful, instructive articles:
- 9 Best SEO Tools for WordPress
- Google Site Kit – WordPress Plugin Review/ Setup Guide
- How Web Hosting Affects SEO (5 Things That Matter)