explains its new Sitemap Index Coverage Report //

Bing quietly launched the new Sitemap Index Coverage Report in Bing Webmaster Tools today and posted a guide on how to use it. I think the new sitemap coverage report started rolling out in late June 2023, and pushed to everyone a couple of weeks ago. But Bing has not formally announced this new report.

Bing stated that they try to download valid and relevant sitemaps every day, except when the lastmod date indicates that your sitemaps have not changed.

What it shows What the sitemap report shows

• This page shows the sitemaps that have been submitted or discovered organically for your website, including the date they were submitted, their status (successful or not), the last crawl date, how many URLs have been discovered, a hyperlink to Index Coverage, when the data is available, as well as the option to resubmit the sitemaps.
• Sitemaps Index File: A listing of all sitemaps and any issues found.
• Bing reports the status of URL indexing for both URLs that are indexed as well as URLs that need attention. This includes sitemaps, sitemap index files and URLs with a high indexing rate. This is currently available to sites with more than 10,000 URLs in Bing.

What does it look like? This is an example of the report.

How it helps. Bing says this report will help you improve your search results by:

• First, ensure that Bing knows about all relevant sitemaps for your website. You can submit any missing sitemaps to Bing, or include them in your robots.txt or sitemap index files.
• Second, identify and fix in your sitemaps. If you notice that Bing Bot cannot crawl your sitemaps, check that robots.txt settings are not blocking it. To ensure maximum visibility, make sure that individual sitemaps have been organized using Index Sitemaps. This will limit the number of URLs in each sitemap to less than 50,000.
• The third step is to investigate the reasons why the URLs in your sitemaps have not been indexed. This can be done by looking for URLs that need attention.

Why we care. If your URLs are not indexed by Bing Search it can result in less traffic for your organization or business. This report will help you to understand which pages have been indexed and which ones are not. It also gives you hints on why these pages are not indexed.

This report will help you to improve your Bing Search index rate and increase your traffic.

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