Bing Webmaster Tools began testing its new Sitemap Index Coverage report in June after it was announced a few months prior. As of a few weeks ago, it went fully live, but Microsoft didn't announce it until yesterday at the keynote Fabrice Canel gave at PubCon.
Here is what the report looks like:
You should be able to access this report within your own Bing Webmaster Tools login.
Saral Nigam, Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Tools team said, "The Sitemap Index Coverage reports on how many pages from your sitemap(s) are indexed by Bing, how many pages are excluded from indexing, and why they are excluded. For a given issue category, sample URLs can be seen along with the last crawl date." "The report shows you a summary of the sitemap’s index coverage, including the total number of pages indexed and not indexed. You can also see a breakdown of the exclusion reasons, such as Not yet crawled, redirected, etc. You can click on each category to see the sample URLs, the last crawl date, the index status, and the exclusion reason," they added.
This report shows you:
- A page that shows all the submitted and organically discovered sitemaps for your site, along when they were submitted, their status (success or error), last crawl dates, the number of URLs discovered, a link to Index Coverage when this data is available and ability resubmit sitemaps.
- Per sitemaps index file, a listing of all the sitemaps included and the issues detected if any.
- New – Per large sitemaps to start, we report a breakdown of URLs indexing status for URLs indexed and URLs which need attention.
For more details, see this blog post from Microsoft.
Content quality is a really nice notice:
Heads-up. Via the new sitemaps coverage report in Bing Webmaster Tools that rolled out today, you will see reasons for why urls aren't indexed, including *CONTENT QUALITY*. Yep a search engine telling you there are quality problems with specific urls. Dig in there :) thx @facan pic.twitter.com/ZyY86TVBHG
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 21, 2023
Forum discussion at Twitter.
