Bing announced it has added support to submit URLs to the search engine in batch mode. That means instead of making an API request for each URL you submit to Bing, you can batch multiple URLs into a single API request. Bing said it supports up to 500 URLs per batch submission.
How it works. Bing said, this is “very similar to the individual URL Submission API (Blogpost) and hence integrating the Batch API is very easy and follows the same steps.” Here is a screen shot of code examples, but you can review the API docs over here.
Some history. Earlier this year, Bing announced it expanded support for the Bing webmaster tools URL submission tool from 10 URLs per day to 10,000 URLs per day. Then a few weeks later, Bing introduced its indexing API and requested that sites begin using it to notify Bing of new URLs and content for it to index.
The new batch mode does not increase the number of URLs you can submit per day, but it does let you maintain a lower API request limit. Bing wrote, “Do note that the maximum supported batch size in this API is 500 URLs per request. Total limit on numbers of URLs submitted per day still applies.”
Why you should care. If you launch a brand new site and that site is large, it can be useful to batch the URL submissions for efficiency. This also comes into play when you restructure your web site or maybe even start using the Bing indexing API for the first time.
As we said before, Bing has taken a turn when it comes to discovery. It wants webmasters and publishers to push it content versus crawling and indexing content in the traditional manner.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.