Today the Bing team announced that it is launching MSNBot 2.0b and will be retiring MSNBot 1.1.
This may seem like an under-the-hood kind of change that has no relevance, but with all the hoopla about Bing increasing their search engine market share, this should further improve their position in the search engine race.
Why is this a significant upgrade for Bing?
Several webmasters and SEOs have noted that the former MSNBot was either not indexing their site enough to discover all the available content. Or it would crawl their sites too often taking up their precious bandwidth.
As most SEOs know, including as many of your site’s pages within a search index is at the core of optimizing a website. If a search engine doesn’t know about all your available content, it hampers your potential for increasing traffic from that particular search engine.
To illustrate the impact this will have for certain websites that have been largely ignored by Bing I’ve provided some site index data for Suite101.com a very large content website that has as much as 25 million visits per month. As you can see, Google & Yahoo had no problem indexing the site’s content, which uses an XML sitemap to improve the discoverability of its content. Bing was seriously lagging behind in the indexing department.
Suite101.com Pages Indexed
| Oct ‘09 | Today | |
| 1.8 million | 2 million | |
| Yahoo | 4 million | 4 million |
| Bing | 300,000 | 1,000,000 |
That’s an increase of 233% more pages in Bing’s index which will give this website a greater chance at capturing more search traffic from Bing. So keep a close eye on your traffic data in the coming weeks. If the newer MSNBot works as promised it could lead to increased traffic for your site.
{ 1 trackback }
Comments on this entry are closed.