2

I have submitted my Wordpress XML sitemap to Bing Master Tools. It is properly crawled and working as expected.

Bing also automatically finds my WordPress category listing pages RSS feeds and enlists them as other sitemaps. Such RSS feeds are listed as sitemaps for almost all of the categories. I have to manually login to Bing Webmaster and delete them, but again just automatically find them again. Is there anyway to stop Bing Webmaster for enlisting such RSS feeds?

I would only like to have my regular site map in Bing Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps should affect search results. There are some pages to which I want Bing to give more priority. That is how my XML sitemap is designed. So I just want my XML sitemap in Bing Webmasters.

Improve this question
2
  • I'm not sure about Bing, but for Google, XML sitemaps have almost nothing to do with what gets indexed or how well things rank. Google ignores the priority field and usually doesn't choose what to index based on the sitemap unless it discovers duplicate pages. See The Sitemap Paradox. I would be surprised if Bing uses XML sitemaps all that much either. My guess is that the RSS feeds that Bing discovers are not hurting your site in any way.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 11:52
  • Hi.. thanks for the link of The Sitemap Paradox. I'm partially agree with it, however, I could try let Google understand about my site's structure so that it can try to crawl as maximum as possible. I am just taking a leverage of a feature available in Google Webmasters. To be honest, for the Bing I am working only since few months, that is why I am thinking in in a same way as of Google. However, you've rightly said, It is equally possible that it doesn't hurt my search trends (issue is, bing traffic is very low :D :D so I am unable to figure it out) Let's see..
    – Bhargav Joshi
    Commented Dec 23, 2017 at 16:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

As you've observed, Bing respects/crawls both RSS and xml sitemaps for indexing and doesn't really distinguish the two formats for priority.

  1. You could add a priority ranking/value to the rss feed urls in your xml sitemap so that Bing's bots don't crawl them with such precedence. Refer to the Sitemap XML Format standards for an example with priority setting, and more about XML attributes for your listed pages.

  2. Per Bing's Sitemap Best Practices blog post,

    • be sure you've doublechecked/set properties and attributes in your RSS feed to help ensure how they are interpreted.
    • minimize the number of RSS feeds on your site/consolidate them and show more than just the 10 most recent posts when applicable.

  3. If you absolutely need to prevent Bing from crawling your rss feed and indexing based on it, you could consider blocking the rss feeds from the Bing crawler in robots.txt, but I wouldn't recommend it. Instead- just configure your XML Sitemap to be submitted regularly (either daily, a few times a week, or weekly) to the search engines.

Improve this answer
1
  • Thanks for the reply. I’ll try to implement the solutions.
    – Bhargav Joshi
    Commented Dec 24, 2017 at 5:17

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.