• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 3, 2021

Microsoft opened its Bing content submission API to all after running it in private beta for more than two-and-a-half years. The idea is to use fewer lines of code to index content — web pages or updates to a page — and have them serve up faster in search-query results.

“The API provides the ability for webmasters to notify Bing directly about the changes in their site content in real time,” Microsoft wrote in a post published Friday.

Unlike the Bing URL submission API, the content submission API allows marketers to submit a URL and content, images, HTML and more directly to Bing’s index.

The API aims to help marketers reach more relevant users on Bing and reduce BingBot crawl load on websites. The focus turns to real-time discovery and indexing of web pages that are most relevant to a website user.

The content submission API — along with the URL submissions API launched earlier this year — will give website owners increased flexibility for sending the updated content and URLs to Bing as soon as the changes are made, so that people searching can see the updated content when changes to websites are made.

Guidelines to set up the Bing Content Submission API are available. The guide includes information on generating an API key and integration with a website to begin submitting content. Technical documents are also provided.

The URL submissions API has seen success with companies such as eBay, LinkedIn, Love2dev, and Bizapedia.

Chris Reynolds, head of technical SEO at eBay, told Microsoft that with more than 1.5 billion listings it’s difficult to keep indexes up to date. eBay uses the Bing URL submission API to notify Bing whenever important new pages are created or updated.