Bing, since its inception, had to tussle with its bigger and better known counterparts like Google and Yahoo search for recognition and visibility. In a bid to be a webmaster-friendly search engine, the company has come out with a new sitemap plug-in. According to reports, the new plug-in will allow webmasters to create sitemaps in XML. Also, there are two types of XML sitemaps that can be created with this plug-in.
Operates on Both Apache and IIS Servers
At the time of the announcement of the new Sitemap plug-in, Bing also announced that the server-side application can work on both Apache and IIS servers. This move might be due to the fact that both types of servers are equally in demand and are used extensively around the world. You can use the plug-in to create a detailed and comprehensive sitemap with parameters that can be defined while creating the sitemap. You can download the binary files for this plug-in from Microsoft’s download site.
Two Types of Sitemaps
One of the sitemap files that you can create with the new Bing Sitemap plug-in is focused on server traffic. Here, you can see the list of URLs that have redirected web traffic to your server. A comprehensive list that can be easily studied and analyzed will be created.
The other sitemap focuses on changed URLs. You get a comprehensive list of all the changed URLs on your server. But the catch here is that this type of sitemap will only display the recently changed URLs. If you want information for an extended period of time, you cannot use this type of sitemap.
Benefits of Sitemaps
According to Duane Forrester, the delta and comprehensive sitemaps, as they are called by Bing, have a number of significant advantages. Firstly, webmasters can have a complete, up-to-date list of the websites that the search engines use for deep crawling. All the URLs will be present in the sitemap and the webmasters can use these URLs to increase search engine traffic to their sites.
With the delta sitemap (recently changed URLs list), webmasters will have the list of URLs that the search engine crawlers prioritize. This will ensure that the Bot traffic bandwidth to your site is substantially kept low.
In addition to this, the Sitemap plug-in will assign popularity values to your URL based on how popular your URL/s are, just like Page Rank. So, if you are taking XML training classes, make sure that you ask your instructor to add a session on how to use the Bing Sitemap plug-in effectively. It will definitely come in handy, especially if you plan on becoming a webmaster.
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