How quickly does Bing index URLs submitted through Webmaster Tools?

Question

In Bing's Webmaster Tools, there is a Submit URLs page that allows you to "Submit URLs that are currently not in the Bing index or that should be reindexed due to recent changes."

Does anyone know how long it takes Bing to index pages submitted here? I submitted several pages yesterday; Some are listed in Bing (they have been live for a week so may have already been indexed) but most are not.

I'm not expecting miracles since it's only been ~30 hours; however, I assume they will be indexed through this tool faster than they would be naturally.

Solution 1

I don't know whether or not users have found this to be true in practice, but according to a recent interview with Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, URLs submitted through Webmaster tools are immediately indexed and available for SERPs:

It is a really powerful tool. It inserts the URL directly into our index...If you use this tool to inject a site or a URL, it goes directly into the index and shows up almost instantly inside the SERPs. You are then at the mercy of user experience to tell us if it is good content. This is a new URL so there is no history, there are no links pointed to it, we have no other signals but we are willing to give it a try and it goes in the index. If the users love it, it stays. If the users don’t like it, it gets dropped. This is a way to determine if the users feel this was a quality result.

Solution 2

There's no 100% correct answer and I don't think someone from Microsoft could even give you an exact timeframe. Depending on factors such as inbound links, domain aging, code validity, server setup, etc it could be anywhere from a day to over a month. Remember, it's not just that they can find you, but also that the crawler has available process time to crawl your site.

In my experience, if I've got the domain parked with some "shell" content and roll the new site over, it's generally picked up in 3-4 days. I have had a site languish nearly a month without getting picked up for whatever reason. But in that case I registered a fresh domain immediately before launch, paid little attention to linking, and had a site with some undoubtedly obscure content that I doubt more than a few people were searching for at first....but the work paid the bills, so I guess I couldn't complain. Ironically, that same site now gets ridiculous traffic thanks to some very positive non-web PR. Go figure.

Good luck, be patient. It sounds like you've taken steps to make this process go well, so I'm sure you'll see your site on Bing soon.

Comments

[Kristian Damian]

Why do you mind about Bing? The only important thing is too get listed in Google.

[MrG]

Why not? Even if bing only brings 10% of traffic, I'd prefer that 10% visited/spent money at my site as supposed to a competitors.

[DisgruntledGoat]

Yeah Bing is not completely irrelevant (especially after the Yahoo merger). I don't spend much time at all thinking about Bing.

[Fiasco Labs]

Google had my site fully indexed in about a month. Bing? Well, still working on it 3 months later with only 1/3 of the content indexed, despite all the traffic it creates. It keeps adding 42% a month so it'll get there in a year or so, I guess. Mouse constant being used from a failed planet experiment created by pandimensional beings? Who knows?

[DisgruntledGoat]

I think you misread the question. I'm asking specifically about URLs submitted through Bing's Webmaster Tools, not natural crawling.

[DisgruntledGoat]

Thanks, I already have a sitemap and a good chunk of the site is already indexed. I was just wondering if the manual submission was faster than natural crawling.

[Ciarán Walsh]

Honestly, answer is still valid because nobody but Bing knows what priority they give to URL submission. It still depends on them having processing time to crawl your site, still is important to follow the other steps in the event that the crawler reaches you via other methods first. In the example I give, I also submitted via the form, and it seemed to do nothing to help speed the process. Bottom line--no matter what any so-called SEO expert says, unless they work for the search engine they're preaching about, nobody knows EXACTLY what these search engines are doing...