Bing announced the Content Submission API is now in more of a public beta phase after being in a private beta for over two-years now. The Bing Webmaster Team said now, in addition to the URL submission API, it now gives publishers and site owners “the ability to notify Bing directly about URL along with content changes via Bing Content Submission API.”
Bing Content Submission API. The Content Submission API is a method that enables websites to directly send content to Microsoft Bing whenever website contents is updated or created without waiting for BingBot crawl. This is different from the URL submission API where with the URL submission API you only can send URLs for Bing to crawl and index. With the Content Submission API you not only send the URL but you send along the your HTML, content, images and so on directly to Bing to index, technically bypassing the crawling process completely.
Why use it. Bing says it not only helps you get your content and pages into Microsoft Bing Search faster but also “will reduce BingBot crawl load on your sites.”
How to get started. Microsoft said you will need to request an API key within Bing Webmaster Tools. This API key can be generated from Bing Webmaster Tools by following these steps:
- Sign in to your account on Bing Webmaster Tools. In case you do not already have a Bing Webmaster account, sign up today using any of Microsoft, Google or Facebook ID.
- Add & verify the site that you want to submit URL for through the API, if not already done.
- Click on Settings button on top right corner and then go to API Access section. If you are generating the API key for the first time, please click Generate to create an API Key. Else you will see the key previously generated
The company shared code examples on its blog post on how to submit this content through the API.
Why we care. This solution not only helps expedite indexing for your new or updated URLs, like the Content Submission API offered but it also bypassing crawling of that content and lets you submit content directly to the search engine. This solution might be something you want to test out on your sites or client sites and see if it makes a big difference on indexing and your server resources.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.