My Blog Shows Up in Google But Not in Bing - Why?

When I started blogging, all my traffic pretty much were from direct, meaning someone knows the URL to my blog and type it in the location bar. Most likely those people are myself. As time goes by, I added more content, post links in twitter, stackoverflow.com, facebook, etc, my blog starts to pick up some traffic, both from referral (someone clicks a link to get to my blog) or from search engine (mostly Google). Now, my site traffic source is about 80% from search engine results. I use Google Analytics to track my traffic.

So, when Microsoft released Bing, I tried it and I like it. I was considering switching totally to Bing as my main search engine, but one thing that saddened me was that Bing did not produce results for my blog, even when I entered partial URL of my blog address, or the title of my blog, or any keywords in it. Basically I came to the conclusion that since Blogger or Blogspot is owned by Google, they must be crawling it automatically, maybe somewhat prioritize it in their ranking. But, Bing does not crawl Blogspot - which includes my blog.

So how can we fix this?




Turns out, there is a "Bing Webmaster Center" page (here), where you can submit your site to be crawl by Bing (assuming it has not been crawled). Voila! So I went in there, click "Sign in to use the tools" button in the middle of the page. Then it asked me to sign in with my Windows Live ID (this can be your hotmail account, LIVE account, MSN account). Once logged in, I clicked on the "Add a site" button, enter my blog address in the "Web address:" textbox and click "Submit".

Then the webmaster tool will present an option to authenticate your site. You can either place an XML file in your site or add a meta tag in the homepage of your site. I selected to use the second option (add metatag) since my blog is hosted in Blogger/Blogspot and I cannot add a file - but adding a metatag just means I have to modify the template of my blog. So I went to my blog layout administration screen, copied and pasted the metatag from Bing Webmaster page and saved the template.

Now back in the Bing Webmaster page, I clicked "Return to site list". In there I can see all the sites that I have registered with Bing to be crawled and I can check the status as well by clicking on the link for each site. Wait for several days for crawling and everything is all set! Pretty easy!

Bing
Bing Webmaster Center
Google Analytics