Bing is getting serious about crawling the mobile web, finally. At least now, they shared how they are doing it by adding new Bingbot mobile user agents, so they can crawl more of the mobile web, including mobile sites not built only in a responsive way.
Bing said they still do prefer you do your mobile sites in a responsive design but they said they are "cognizant of the fact that many sites still use different URLs for their mobile phone or smart phone customers or have varying levels of user experiences depending on the type of device." Because of this, Bing said they "have started to probe websites with a number of new crawlers" to understand that content better.
The new Bingbot mobile user agents include:
Mozilla/5.0 + (Mobile Device) + Mobile Engine + Mobile Browser + bingbot/BingPreview/[version]
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
And like Google, Bing says do not block Bing from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
