• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 13, 2022

Microsoft Bing from the start offered webmasters the ability to submit sitemaps URLs anonymously through HTTP requests, but no more.

Beginning today, the company will stop the practice. Fabrice Canel, principal program manager at Microsoft Bing, sited abuse and misuse by search spammers as the reason for disallowing the practice.  

Despite its promise, recent evaluations have shown that it was often subject to misuse by spammers,” Canel wrote in a post. “As a result, we will be deprecating the ability for anonymous sitemap submissions starting today.”

Marketers and webmasters can continue to submit sitemaps using robots.txt on the domain name and/or through Bing Webmaster tools.

When using robots.txt, add a reference to the sitemap in the robots.txt file located at the root of the host to inform all search engines. For example, http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml. Alternatively, marketers and developers can submit sitemaps in Bing Webmaster tools.

Bing and other search engines will attempt to crawl known trusted submitted sitemaps at least once a day for changes, Canel wrote.

Microsoft Bing also encourages marketers and developers to adopt Index Now an additional and supplemental option.