Search Engine Roundtable brings to attention a very sad and disturbing fact about Microsoft Bing. It"s slow at indexing sites. In the Bing Forums, prathaban1 posted the following:
"I have submitted my website, www.kidandparent.in, to the Webmaster Console, using a sitemap.xml almost 6 weeks ago. It is a new website with unique content and Bing calculates about 14 Backlinks to it. However, just the homepage has been indexed so far (with help from Brett). G and Y have indexed almost 400 and 200 pages respectively. Any pointers on what I can do to get indexed by Bing?"
Brett Yount, who is the Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, responded:
"It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow. I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do."
But wait, it gets better. Here"s the sticky from the "sites not in the index" section of the Bing Forum:
"if your site is not in the index, please do the following:
1. verify in our tools that your site is not blocked
2. run a site: query to verify there are no pages in the index
3. Copy the URL of the site query and post on this thread.
I will work with you to at least get your home page indexed. Deeper indexing will require good content and backlinks as described in the FAQ."
I ask you to please read number 3 again. Yes, that"s correct. If your site doesn"t show up in Bing"s index after submitting it through the site, you can post your website"s address in the forum, and someone will manually add it into the index for you. How can Microsoft expect Bing to compete with Google if it can"t even handle the simple task of indexing a page within an acceptable time frame? Microsoft says they are serious about conquering the world of search, but problems like this one tend to take search domination out of the equation. It would be a good idea for Microsoft to straighten this out instead of just openly admitting to its users that everyone knows they"re slow.