On Friday, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft announced Bing has deprecated the anonymous sitemap submission method. Bing will no longer accept Sitemap submissions through HTTP requests.
It was removed because of spammers, "recent evaluations have shown that it was often subject to misuse by spammers," Fabrice Canel wrote. "As a result, we will be deprecating the ability for anonymous sitemap submissions starting today," he added. Thank you Mr. Spammer.
Well, truth is, I assume most of you submit your sitemaps not through this HTTP request method. I.e. HTTP request http://www.bing.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com/sitemap.xml
Most of you probably submit it using robots.txt and / or Bing Webmaster Tools. And probably many of you also use IndexNow by now as well?
Microsoft wrote "we continue to recommend having sitemaps containing all relevant URLs hosted on your web sites and refreshing those once per day. Trusted ways to inform search engines include:"
- robots.txt: Add a reference to your sitemap in the robots.txt file located at the root of the host to inform all search engines. Example: Sitemap: http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml
- Bing webmaster tools: Alternatively, you can submit your sitemaps in Bing Webmaster tools https://www.bing.com/webmasters/sitemaps
So there you go - one more thing we ruined. :-)
Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.
