Bing Webmaster Tools
Whether you use a subdomain provided by HelpGuides or your own domain, submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools so Bing indexes your content.
Why submit to Bing Webmaster Tools?
Bing can only show your content in search results if it knows about it. Bing Webmaster Tools lets you submit a sitemap that Bing crawls regularly to keep its index of your content up to date. Bing's index also feeds other search and AI tools, such as Microsoft Copilot.
Create your Bing Webmaster Tools account
Go to https://www.bing.com/webmasters/, sign in and add your site using its full domain, for example example.helpguides.io or your custom domain.
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:
- In HelpGuides, go to Settings and open the Code tab.
- Paste the meta tag into the CSS box, on its own line. Anything in this box is added to the
<head>of every page, which is where Bing looks for the tag. - Click 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.
Go to Sitemaps in Bing Webmaster Tools and add the sitemap for your HelpGuides site.
Your sitemap is your site's address followed by /sitemap.xml. For example:
See Site Map for what the sitemap includes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Below are some frequently asked questions about submitting your HelpGuides site to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bing won't index my content
Open /robots.txt on your site and check that it doesn't say Disallow: /. If it does, go to Settings → General, turn on Allow Search Engine Indexing and click Update. This setting is off for new projects. robots.txt can take up to 3 hours to update.
I published an article, but Bing isn't indexing it
Check everything in the previous answer. Then make sure the article's status is Published and that Allow Indexing is on for the article: in the editor, click Advanced and open the SEO tab. Allow Indexing is on by default for every article. New articles can take a few days to appear in Bing.
Related: Structured Data, Finding Broken Links with the SEO Report.