Bing Webmaster Tools

Whether using a subdomain provided by HelpGuides or using your own domain, you will need to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing.

Why submit to Bing Webmaster Tools?

In order for the Bing search engine to crawl your content for search, it needs to know about it. Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to submit a sitemap to Bing that it can regularly crawl to update it's search index for your content.

Create your Bing Webmaster Tools account

Navigate to https://www.bing.com/webmasters/ and create an account. You will need to have the full domain of the site you want to create, e.g. example.helpguides.io.

Verify your Bing Webmaster Tools account

Bing will provide several options for verifying your ownership of the domain.

Verify using a meta tag

This is the easiest option for users of HelpGuides:

Copy the meta tag provided by Bing for verification. It will look something like:

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="E13E88EAC44D162B933255FC65C62FE4" />

Navigate to Settings for your HelpGuides.io project and go to the Code tab
Paste the meta tag from step 1 in the code tab and save
Go back to Bing Webmaster Tools and click Verify

Submit your Sitemap to Bing

Once verified, the last step is to tell Bing about your content.

Navigate to Sitemaps in Bing Webmaster Tools and add the sitemap for your HelpGuides content.

You can find your Sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of your HelpGuides website. For example, https://docs.helpguides.io/sitemap.xml.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some frequently asked questions about submitting your HelpGuides site to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing won't index my content

Go to the /robots.txt for your website and verify that content can be indexed. Check that Allow Search Engine indexing is enabled in your HelpGuides site settings.

I published an article, but Bing isn't indexing it

See above, but also ensure that the article's status is Published and that the article's Allow Search Engine Indexing is enabled. Indexing is enabled by default for all articles, but can be disabled.