How quickly does Bing index URLs submitted through Webmaster Tools?

Question

In Bing's Webmaster Tools, there is a Submit URLs page that allows you to "Submit URLs that are currently not in the Bing index or that should be reindexed due to recent changes."

Does anyone know how long it takes Bing to index pages submitted here? I submitted several pages yesterday; Some are listed in Bing (they have been live for a week so may have already been indexed) but most are not.

I'm not expecting miracles since it's only been ~30 hours; however, I assume they will be indexed through this tool faster than they would be naturally.

Answer 1

I don't know whether or not users have found this to be true in practice, but according to a recent interview with Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager with Bing’s Webmaster Program, URLs submitted through Webmaster tools are immediately indexed and available for SERPs:

It is a really powerful tool. It inserts the URL directly into our index...If you use this tool to inject a site or a URL, it goes directly into the index and shows up almost instantly inside the SERPs. You are then at the mercy of user experience to tell us if it is good content. This is a new URL so there is no history, there are no links pointed to it, we have no other signals but we are willing to give it a try and it goes in the index. If the users love it, it stays. If the users don’t like it, it gets dropped. This is a way to determine if the users feel this was a quality result.

Answer 2

There's no 100% correct answer and I don't think someone from Microsoft could even give you an exact timeframe. Depending on factors such as inbound links, domain aging, code validity, server setup, etc it could be anywhere from a day to over a month. Remember, it's not just that they can find you, but also that the crawler has available process time to crawl your site.

In my experience, if I've got the domain parked with some "shell" content and roll the new site over, it's generally picked up in 3-4 days. I have had a site languish nearly a month without getting picked up for whatever reason. But in that case I registered a fresh domain immediately before launch, paid little attention to linking, and had a site with some undoubtedly obscure content that I doubt more than a few people were searching for at first....but the work paid the bills, so I guess I couldn't complain. Ironically, that same site now gets ridiculous traffic thanks to some very positive non-web PR. Go figure.

Good luck, be patient. It sounds like you've taken steps to make this process go well, so I'm sure you'll see your site on Bing soon.

Answer 3

Regarding your main question I'd second the first paragraph of bpeterson76s answer (+1). For adding multiple pages you should be aware of the following limits recently outlined in Cool Tips And Hot Tricks For The New Bing Webmaster Tools, Part 2 as well though:

As with the Recrawl URLs feature mentioned in the Part 1 post, the Submit URLs feature is not limitless. Bing does set quota limits on the number of URLs that can be added and/or recrawled (both apply to the same quota). You can submit up to 10 URLs per day and up to 50 per month. The quotas are in effect for entire domains. Multiple webmaster accounts for the same domain cannot combine their quotas to get more URL submissions. Bing also disallows submitting redirected pages to a site already at full quota.

Also, note that the daily quota limit resets after midnight GMT, at which point you can resume adding more URLs (provided you have enough monthly quota left).

This might obviously have a drastic impact on the results you can expect from this manual URL submission (which I personally consider more of a band aid for small and/or manually maintained sites therefore: I would definitely go the route of automating the generation and submission of a dedicated sitemap - or RSS feed for that matter ;) - as soon as possible myself).

Answer 4

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a difference between crawling and indexing. The purpose of submitting URLs is to make sure they get crawled, however, you need to do all the other stuff bpeterson mentioned, build links, make sure you have unique content, etc. This will all have an impact on indexing regardless of whether you submit the URLs or they are crawled naturally.

Answer 5

This might obviously have a drastic impact on the results you can expect from this manual URL submission which I personally consider more of a band aid for small and/or manually maintained sites therefore: I would definitely go the route of automating the generation and submission of a dedicated sitemap - or RSS feed for that matter - as soon as possible.

Answer 6

One thing to keep in mind is that there is a difference between crawling and indexing. The purpose of submitting URLs is to make sure they get crawled, however, you need to do all the other stuff bpeterson mentioned, build links, make sure you have unique content, etc. This will all have an impact on indexing regardless of whether you submit the URLs or they are crawled naturally.