Bing Tests Content Submission API Removing Crawling Requirement

Bing announced a pilot, a really early test, for a content submission API. The content submission API takes it a step further than Bing’s efforts to have you just submit URLs for crawling and indexing. Instead, this is you feeding Bing not just your URL but also all of its content, HTML, images, etc – so Bing does not need to crawl the page at all.

Here is the tweet of Fabrice Canel of Bing announcing it at PubCon:

#pubcon @facan announcing about content submission pilot. pic.twitter.com/PduaFtNKDG

— Bing Webmaster Team (@BingWMC) October 9, 2019

Earlier this year, Bing was pushing webmasters to submit URLs you want them to crawl and index. Bing doesn’t want to do the discovery process, it is expensive and also impacts your servers.

But this is a level up – where Bing is asking you not just to save them on the discovery portion but also on them crawling the page at all. I assume Bing still crawls the page but it doesn’t have to.

There is no way I know of to be part of this pilot, it seems really locked down and being tested with a few publishers.

I just didn’t necessarily expect this to go this far with Bing.

I am not saying this is a bad thing for webmasters, but I doubt Google follow this approach any time soon.

Forum discussion at Twitter.