NEW YORK — At SMX East Wednesday morning, Bing’s Christi Olson and Frederic Dubut explained that when they shut down the public URL submission tool globally in mid-September, it resulted in an influx of URL submissions to the alternative authenticated submission form in Bing Webmaster Tools. That meant URLs began to take weeks to be processed as opposed to hours or a day.
Bing worked through the backlog of URLs. Frederic Dubut explained that Bing has now worked through the backlog of these URL submissions. The company did not expect such an influx after removing the public tool.
New URL submission limits coming soon. In addition, they said that, in the upcoming weeks, Bing will begin to limit the number of URLs that can be submitted via Bing Webmaster Tools.
This change comes after Bing noticed that spammers have now switched to using Bing Webmaster Tools to submit a ton of spammy URLs. Allowing only the authenticated submission method was meant to resolve the issue, but it did not. The upcoming limit will govern the number of URLs a site owner can submit within a certain timeframe via Bing Webmaster Tools, with the aim of staving off the spammy link submissions.
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Why does this matter? So now that the public tool has been removed and Bing has discovered abuse of the authenticated method via Webmaster Tools, reputable URL submissions may take longer to process and be found by Bing. Though Bing didn’t indicate what the limits would be, I’d expect they will set the limit somewhere between 10 to 50 URLs per day.
Ultimately, Bing should be able to crawl new content without using these tools. But if you’re one of the people that depend on the submission tool, your workflow may change soon.
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.