Microsoft announced last night that the Bing Content Submission API is now in beta and open to be used by site owners, publishers, webmasters or whatever you cool kids are calling yourselves these days. Microsoft announced this over two years ago and while the company released the URL submission API a while ago, the content submission API has been in a private beta since then.
We knew this was coming, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us it would be here soon just a couple of months ago.
The URL submission API allows you to only submit URLs for crawling or re-crawling. It is now new and heck, I've been using the URL submission API here for a while, it works, and works well.
The content submission API is different, it was just launched publicly as a beta yesterday. It not only lets you submit URLs but the HTML that goes along with it. This technically stops the need for BingBot to access the page and crawl the page to see the content. You just push your URL and content to Bing and it will take it and use it in its index. This should save both Bing and your site significant server resources.
Bing shared on its blog post how to use the API, you can read that there. You can fill out this form to be part of this public beta.
I wonder if Bing will add to Bing Webmaster Tools will show you anything but even if not, the API should return a response code when valid. If the URL submission is successful you will receive an http 200 response. Here is what you can submit:
Fabrice Canel from Bing said on Twitter "What's a beautiful way to start an #SEO email..." He added "the intend is not to replace our crawler bingbot (yet...)." I love the word "yet" here.
I asked Fabrice for a bit more clarification and he explained more in these tweets:
And we tweaked the text to make this clear: "We are offering this program in beta to all webmasters interested, to access it you need to contact us by filling this form." https://t.co/k9cwuAXmzK If we observe that most don't do mistakes we will remove the form. Thanks @rustybrick
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) May 7, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
