Webmaster help and how-to

How To Connect Your Website To Bing Webmaster Tools

Open a Bing Webmaster Tools account
You can open a free Bing Webmaster Tools account by going to the Bing Webmaster Tools sign-in or sign-up page. All you need is a Microsoft account (formerly known as a Windows Live ID). If you have a Hotmail or Outlook.com account you likely already have a Microsoft account. If not, you can get an account for free here. Alternatively, just click the link Sign-Up with Microsoft account and create a Microsoft account as part of the Webmaster Tools sign-up process.
Add and Verify the website
Once you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account, you can add sites to your account. You can do so by entering the URL of your site into the Add a Site input box and clicking Add. Next, we would like to verify that you are the owner of the website. There are three ownership verification methods. Click the option best suited for your site and follow the on-screen instructions:
- Option 1: XML file authentication: click BingSiteAuth.xml to save the an XML file to your computer. This file contains your personal verification code. Next, upload the file to the root folder of the site you are trying to add.
- Option 2: Meta tag authentication: Copy the displayed <meta> tag with your personal verification code to the clipboard. Then open your registered site’s default page (the home page) in your web development environment editor and paste the provided code at the end of the <head> section. Lastly, save and upload the revised default page containing the new <meta> tag to your site.
- Option 3: Add a CNAME record to DNS: This option requires access to your domain hosting account. Inside that account, edit the CNAME record to hold the provided verification code (a series of numbers and letters) we have provided you. When done ensure the information is saved.

Verify Ownership of Your Website

To complete the addition of a new site to your account, you need to verify that you own the site by proving ownership. There are three ownership verification methods. Click the option best suited for your site and follow the on-screen instructions:

XML File authentication: Click BingSiteAuth.xml to save the custom XML file, which contains your customized ownership verification code, to your computer, and then upload the file to the root directory of the registered site.
Meta tag authentication: Copy the displayed <meta> tag with your custom ownership verification code to the clipboard. Then open your registered site’s default page in your web development environment editor and paste the code at the end of the <head> section. Make sure the <head> section is followed by a <body> tag. Lastly, upload the revised default page file containing the new <meta> tag to your site.
Add CNAME record to DNS: This option requires access to your domain hosting account. Inside that account you would edit the CNAME record to hold the verification code (series of numbers and letters) we have provided you. When complete, we can see this information and verify your ownership of the site.

Once you have added the ownership verification code to your site or in your DNS, click Verify. If Bing Webmaster Tools is able to verify your site, you will see your site information begin to populate. If you see a red text message stating “We weren't able to verify your site,” review the information in the steps above and try again.

Content Removal: Report Broken Links or Outdated Cache Pages

The Content Removal Tool allows you to notify Bing about two types of outdated content in our web results:

Pages that appear in our web search results that are broken links (404 - Not Found)
Pages that appear in our web search results that contain outdated content in the cached version of the page

Removing a Broken Link (Page Removal)

When a page has been removed from a website it will eventually drop out of our search index as we re-crawl the page and find it is gone. However, this re-crawl process can take time. The Content Removal tool allows you to notify us of the fact that the URL of the page is broken (404 - Not Found). If you submit a page removal requests, we will check whether the page is in fact no longer live on the web and if that is the case, we will expedite the process of removing the URL from our search results. If, however, the URL points to a page that is still live on the web, you are given the option to remove outdated cached content instead. If we are unable to determine either (for example, because we cannot connect to the server on which the page resides) you will not be able to submit a page removal or outdated cache removal request at this moment in time.

Steps to Submit a Page Removal Request

You can submit a page removal request for a page that is no longer live on the web (404) by doing the following:

Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/tools/content-removal and sign in with your Microsoft account (formerly known as Windows Live ID)
In the Content URL input box, enter the exact URL you found in the Bing web results (for example, by using Copy Shortcut/Copy Link Address functionality in your browser)
In the Removal Type drop-down menu select Page Removal
Click Submit

When you click submit, we will run a check whether the page is actually no longer available on the web. If that is the case, we will submit the request and add it the Submission History table. However, if we detect that the page is still live on the web we will prompt that you can only submit an outdated cache removal (see steps below).

Removing Outdated Cache (Outdated cache removal)

When a page is still live on the web, the Bing crawler (Bingbot) will revisit it in regular intervals to update the content in our index and store a copy in the Bing cache. However, changes can take time to be reflected in the index and the cached page. You can notify Bing about outdated cache by providing the URL and a piece of text from the outdated cached page that is no longer present on the page that is live on the web.

Steps to Submit an Outdated Cache Removal Request

You can submit an outdated cache removal request for a page that is live on the web (HTTP status code 200) and for which we still have old and outdated content in our cache by doing the following:

Go to www.bing.com/webmaster/tools/content-removal and sign in with your Microsoft account (formerly known as Windows Live ID).
In the Content URL input box, enter the exact URL you found in the Bing web results (for example, by using Copy Shortcut/Copy Link Address functionality in your browser)
In the Removal Type drop-down menu, select Outdated Cache Removal
In the Cached Page Text, enter the text that still appears on the cached page that no longer appears on the page that is live on the web
Click Submit

We will now check whether the page actually no longer contains the words that you've entered. If we've established that, your request will be added to the Submission History table below, showing you the date, Content URL, Removal Type and Status, along with the HTTP Status Code we received from the server.

The Submission History table will show you the most recent submissions that were made for the Microsoft account with which you are logged in. Since this is a history table of the requests you made and their status, you cannot remove or edit individual items afterwards.

Block URLs from Bing

The best way to block URLs that are currently published on your site from showing up in the Bing search results is to add a NOINDEX meta-tag to the HTML header of the page. This tag tells Bing to never add the page to the index, and thus, to never show it in the search results. To be able to do so, Bingbot needs to be able to read this tag on the page, so although this might sound unintuitive, you should not disallow crawl of pages that have a NOINDEX tag in your robots.txt. Robots.txt governs what search engines can visit (that is, fetch from your server) not what they are allowed to add to the index. Visit the section How to Remove a Page from the Bing Index to learn the best ways to remove a page that already has been indexed from the Bing index.

Using the Block URLs feature

The Block URLs feature allows you to temporarily block page and directory URLs as well as cached pages from showing up in the Bing Search result. This is useful as it buys you time to make the necessary changes to a page’s metadata or take a page down. Here's how the Block URLs feature works:

Go to www.bing.com/webmaster/configure and sign in with your Microsoft account (formerly known as Windows Live ID).
Click on Block URLs under Configure My Site
Select the type of URL you wish to block. You can choose either Directory to block an entire directory and it's contents from showing up in the search results, or Page to block a single URL
Enter the full URL you wish to block
Now click either Block URL and Cache to prevent URL and the cached pages from showing up in search, or click Block Cache, to only block the cached page from showing up.
The URL now is added to the list of URLs you have blocked for a period of 90 days.
If you still need to manually block a URL or Cache after 90 days, you will need to extend the block using the Extend button

How to Remove a Page from the Bing Index

If you are not the webmaster or site owner of the page that should be removed from the search results, you should contact the webmaster of the site to take down the content. If that has already happened and the content is no longer on the site, you can use the Content Removal Tool to request a page removal from the Bing Search results.

Method 1: Remove the Page from Your Site and Return a 404

The most natural way for a URL to be removed from Bing's index is to delete it from your site so that the URL returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status. After re-crawling the page and establishing that it has been removed permanently from your site, Bing will remove the page from our search results. Note that in order for Bing to detect that the page has in fact been removed from your site and is now returning a 404 or 410 HTTP status code, Bingbot needs to be able to access the URL, so you should not block the URL from being re-crawled through robots.txt.

Method 2: Add a NOINDEX meta tag to the page

If you want need to remove a URL from the Bing search results that you cannot or don't want to delete from your site as per Option 1, you can add a robots meta tag to your HTML source. Bing honors meta robots tags and adding <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to your page source will ensure that the page will disappear from the index once it has been re-crawled and re-processed. When using the NOINDEX tag, your HTML header would look something like:

<html><head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> (…rest goes here…) </head> <body>…</body> </html>

Note that re-crawling and reprocessing can take some time. Also, make sure not to disallow the URL from being crawled using robots.txt or through other means: we will still need to be able to fetch the page in order to see the NOINDEX tag.

Note: if the URL you want to remove from the index is not a web page but say, a PDF, you can choose to emit X-Robots-Tag: noindex to the response header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Method 3: Remove the URL using the Block URLs tool

If you are in a hurry to get a URL out of the index and haven’t been able implement any of the above 2 methods and wait for the natural recrawl process, you can block a URL using the Block URLs tool inside Webmaster Tools. This should remove the URL from the index within roughly 24 hours. Note that URL blocks are temporary and expire every 90 days, but this should give you time to either remove the page from your index or add a NOINDEX meta tag to the page.

Bing Webmaster help and how-to