On July 1, 2024, Reddit updated its robots.txt file to prohibit most search engine and AI crawlers from accessing its content – including blocking Microsoft Bing. Reddit did not block Google Search, which we covered here a few weeks ago.
Did you ever sort the Bing Webmaster Tools clickthrough-rate column from highest to lowest and notice that you can see a CTR higher than 100%, I even see 300%. Well, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said this is possible when a searcher clicks on your listing more than once from the same search result set.
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft confirmed Microsoft has fixed a bug with Bing Webmaster Tools showing inaccurate and/or irrelevant notifications in the notifications and insights section.
Last week, Bing Webmaster Tools introduced top SEO insights that give you some SEO tips for your site. It even tells you when you don’t have enough good links pointing to your site. Bing can show a message that reads, “Inadequate inbound links from high quality domains.”
Bingbot is now rolling out Brotli compression for its web crawler, Bingbot. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft said on X that Bing “enabled it on a small percentage of URLs crawled each day, and we’ll gradually increase traffic throughout this spring.”
Microsoft updated Bing Webmaster Tools to build out the IndexNow reports, now named IndexNow Insights, add new Top SEO Insights to the main page and also cleaned up the side bar navigation within the tool. Plus, Fabrice Canel announced how IndexNow has grown to over 2.5 billion submitted URLs.
Bing announced this week that it may use AI to create your snippets. Bing is calling this “Generative AI Captions” and if Bing uses AI for your snippet, it will label it as such.
Microsoft Bing is now sending out new emails through Bing Webmaster Tools named “Comprehensive Performance Insights Reports.” These are reports that show you how your site is performing in Bing Search.
Wix now supports IndexNow, the Microsoft initiative to make indexing more efficient and faster.
Bing decided not to wait for the alternative approach to a robots.txt method for blocking AI tools from using your content and decided to go with what is out there now, meta tag approaches. Bing will continue to work with the rest of the AI community to come up with solutions but for now, since Bing Chat is out there, Bing is offering site owners these options.