Microsoft Updates Bing Webmaster Guidelines (A Bit)

Microsoft has updated the design of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines section and changed some of the verbiage. I think overall these are smaller updates, but I have not gone through every single change to double-check as of yet.

You can see the current Bing webmaster guidelines and compare it to the archived version on the Wayback Machine.

The most noticeable change is the design, which now also matches the Bing Webmaster Tools new design.

Also the intro was updated to read:

These guidelines describe how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates, and surfaces content across Bing search experiences, Copilot, and grounding API results.

Following these guidelines helps ensure your URLs are eligible for:

- Indexing and ranking
- Grounding results and citations
- Sustained visibility and qualified traffic

Failure to follow these guidelines may result in reduced visibility in Bing search, reduced eligibility for grounding experiences, or delisting from the Bing index.

It used to read:

These guidelines are intended to help you understand how Bing finds, indexes, and ranks websites.

Following these guidelines will help with indexing of your site on Bing. It will also help you optimize your site to increase its opportunity to rank for relevant queries in Bing’s search results. Please pay special attention to the guidance in the “Abuse section” and examples in the “Things to avoid” section. Following the guidelines will ensure your site plays by the rules and is not found to be spammy, which could lead to demotion or even delisting your website from Bing search results.

So Bing added more about "Copilot, and grounding API results" to the guidelines.

Here is the new front page:

Here is the old front page:

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