Bing has enhanced its search crawler, known as bingbot, to improve crawl efficiency. Similar to Googlebot, bingbot’s role is to identify new and updated content and integrate it into Bing’s index.
Webmasters have raised concerns regarding bingbot’s crawling frequency. Some site owners feel that bingbot doesn’t crawl often enough, leading to less fresh content in Bing’s index. Conversely, other site owners find bingbot crawls too frequently, putting a strain on website resources. Bing acknowledges this as an unresolved engineering issue.
To increase bingbot’s efficiency, the focus is on managing how often it needs to crawl a site to ensure that new and updated content is captured in the search index. Bingbot must also consider the needs of site owners, with some requesting daily crawls while many prefer crawling only when new URLs are added or content has been updated.
The core challenge involves adjusting bingbot’s algorithms to reflect the specific desires of webmasters, the frequency of content updates, and accomplishing this on a large scale.
Crawl efficiency is a metric used by Bing to assess bingbot’s performance, measuring how often Bing crawls and identifies new and fresh content per page. Ideally, bingbot would only visit a URL when its content is newly added or updated with relevant information. Crawl efficiency decreases when bingbot repeatedly visits unchanged or duplicate content.
For site owners, the improvements in bingbot’s crawl efficiency mean that their new and updated content should appear promptly in Bing’s index. Additionally, website resources should not be overburdened by bingbot crawling duplicate or unchanged content.
