Bing Bot
TL;DR
The Bing bot is the Bing search engine's crawler, and its purpose is to search the web for HTML files to record them in the Bing index and to rank them.
What is Bingbot?
Bing is a search engine owned by Microsoft and Bingbot is their standard crawler that handles most of the sites' crawling on a daily basis, for both desktop and mobile web!
Bing operates five main crawlers:
- Bingbot. The standard crawler in charge of crawling and indexing sites
- MSNBot. This bot used to be the standard crawler before Bingbot, but it still handles some of the crawling duties.
- MSNBot-Media The crawler that handles images and videos across the Bing search engine's crawled sites.
- AdIdxBot. Represents the crawler used by Bing Ads to crawl the ads and follow through to websites linked from those ads for quality control purposes.
- BingPreview. Stands for the name of the crawler used to generate page snapshots.
To verify the authenticity of the Bingbot crawler (or any other one from the above list), you will see these names in the user agent string. However, user agent strings are easy to spoof, so it is still possible to see visits on your website from what appears to be a Bing crawler, even though it is not. As a general rule, though, Bing does not share the IP addresses of the crawling visit, but to make sure, you can always use the Verify Bingbot tool to verify whether a crawler actually belongs to Bing.
Why is Bingbot crawling important?
Bingbot and the Bing Webmaster Tools help you rank higher and increase your organic reach on Bing search.
To control how crawlers interact with your website, you have two options:
- Robots.txt files can be configured to tell the Bing crawlers how to interact with your website.
- Through the Bing Webmaster tools, you can control crawl rates by hour using the Crawl Control tool.
