Bing & Yahoo Website Submission & Webmaster Tools

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Bing and Yahoo have a combined 28% of search engine traffic. So if you want the most website visitors, then you need to get your website submitted to them. This tutorial will cover the basics of getting your site submitted and setting up Bing webmaster tools. If you missed my previous post, I talked about Google website submission & webmaster tools setup.

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Bing & Yahoo Relationship

The first thing you need to know is that Yahoo is part of the Bing Network. That means that Bing provides the actual search engine for Yahoo searches. The good news is this means you only have to submit your site to Bing and deal with the Bing webmaster tools.

Bing: Submit Your Site

The easiest way to submit your website to Bing is to use their Submit your Site to Bing page.

On the page just enter the URL of your homepage (include the http://) and the captcha. As with most captchas, if you can’t read it, find a 10 year old to help you out (or use your computer’s screen zoom functions).

submit your site to bing

When you’ve successfully entered the correct captcha, you will receive a message from Bing letting you know that your site was successfully submitted. Bing will also prompt you to sign up with their webmaster tools, go ahead and click on sign up.

successful bing site submission

Bing Webmaster Tools

In order to get started with Bing Webmaster Tools you will need a microsoft account. If you already have an account, go ahead and sign in with it. Otherwise, you will need to create an account, you can use any email address to do so.

bing webmaster tools signup

Once signed in you will have the opportunity to add a website to your account. Enter the URL including the http.

add_site

Once you have entered the URL you will be prompted to add a sitemap. It is always recommended that you add a sitemap. The sitemap for Bing must be on the same domain as the URL you have entered. This will not be an issue for most websites, however some site builders use alternate URLs.

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Verify Site Ownership

Once you have added the site, you will need to verify ownership with Bing before they allow you to view metrics. There are three options to do this.

  • Place an XML file on your web server (Recommended)
  • Add a meta tag to your home page (Second favorite)
  • Add CNAME record to DNS (last resort)

Place an XML file on your web server

This is generally the easiest option, however you do need to have FTP or other file manager access. All you do is download is a small XML file to your computer and then upload that file to your site. The file needs to be placed in the same folder location as your home page.

verify_ownership_1

Add a meta tag to your home page

If you don’t have FTP access to your website (usually due to your site builder), then the meta tag is what I recommend. This does involve having access to your home page’s HTML head section. You will need to find the head section in the HTML and paste in the meta tag that Bing provides. Do not edit anything else unless you know what you are doing.

verify_ownership_2

Note: Some site builders (like Google Sites) take the msvalidate.01 and remove the . making it msvalidate01. This prevents Bing from authenticating your site. The workaround is to change the . to a -. So your meta tag will have msvalidate-01 in it.

Add CNAME record to DNS

If the first two aren’t options for you, you’ll have to go with modifying your DNS. You need to select your DNS (you need to know who your registrar is) and then follow the instructions provided.

verify_ownership_3

Verified Site

If site verification is successful you will see a verified message.

You can always tell if your site is verified with Bing webmaster tools by going to My Sites and looking at your website list. If you see “Site ownership has not been verified. Verify now”, then your site is not verified. Click on Verify now to try the verification again. Otherwise you should see metrics, this means you are all set up!

bing_verified

Conclusion

Submitting your site to Bing is as straightforward as submitting it to google (you did submit it to google already didn’t you). However, getting your site setup with Bing webmaster tools is actually a bit easier. Bing walks you through the steps quite nicely and makes it very easy to tell if your site was correctly verified.

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37 thoughts on “Bing & Yahoo Website Submission & Webmaster Tools”

  7. Raghav Tripathi -

    I have problem in Yahoo
    Already Verified at Submit Success ,Indexed
    When I check my website is not
    Indexed. Please Help me Out Sir.

    Reply
    • Gen Herres -

      Just because your site was successfully submitted does not guarantee it will appear in search results. Google and Bing both check to see if your site is “worthy” of inclusion. If you are using a non-standard domain extension (not .com, .net, or .org) then it is typically harder to get indexed, they compare your site against the indexed sites to see if you are unique and worthy of inclusion. For some people this process can take months to get actually listed.

    • Gen Herres -

      If you’ve setup webmaster tools and submitted your sitemap, then check to see if you are showing in bing’s search results. If you are, then you are done. If not, submit your URL.

  10. Mayur -

    Hi,

    Thanks for the article, I followed to the T and manage to get my site approved on bing news, however Google rejected it.

    However, major issue now is.. my site is not getting index. We write 10-15 articles a day and they are all unique.

    So not been able to benefit from the traffic from Bing news it’s real sad.

    How can we get our site indexed?

    Mayur

    Reply
    • Gen Herres -

      You can try the Yoast News plugin: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/news-seo/ — but mostly since you are having difficulty with getting indexed in the first place on Google, the search engines aren’t find your content unique/interesting. This happens a lot when you don’t use one of the main top-level domains (such as .com, .net, and .org). When you use alternative extensions, you frequently have a lot of trouble getting noticed because you are competing directly against whoever has those three top-levels. So example.co has to compete with example.com, example.net, and example.org and prove it is unique and interesting against them.

    • Gen Herres -

      If your site has been verified and Bing has verified that they have crawled it but you are NOT showing up in search results, then you are going to be facing an uphill battle. It means when Bing checked your site they didn’t think that you were unique. I’ve seen people using top level domains that aren’t .net or .org or .com run into this if their content is very similar to the sites that do have the .net, .org, or .com extension. So if you have example.guru, but your content is very similar to whoever has example.com you can have a hard time getting indexed.

  27. kajal jindal -

    hello.. thanks for your information..but i need to ask something 1. how i can see bounce rate and traffic of my website through bing or yahoo. i already verify my site in bing and make yahoo analytic a/c.. but it shows empty, how can i add site to yahoo analytic to see my website status like bounce rate, website traffic, etc. 2. Like google how can i cache my submitted URL’s in bing

    Reply
    • Gen Herres -

      Bing only provides some analytics for their advertisers. They don’t provide the extensive analytics that Google Analytics does. I’d recommend that you install Google Analytics and then the “Page Analytics (by Google)” extension for Chrome. Once analytics are properly installed and you are signed into the correct google account, that extension will show you a lot of additional detail for your pages in Chrome.

  29. Ramohan -

    I found that Bing indexes slower than Google. For me Google indexed 80 pages in a week, but Bing indexed only 1 page. I submitted my site maps at the same time to both of them. So Yahoo and Bing have to improve their index rate.

    Reply

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