Back in 2019, Microsoft first announced the Bing Content Submission API at PubCon.
Those of you who do not know, PubCon is a premier conference about Search Engine Optimization, social media, Digital Marketing, and PPC.
The idea behind introducing Bing Content Submission API is to let users’ ping Bing about an added content, so that Bing has no need to crawl all the pages.
In fact, Bing says, discovering content on our own affects both us and the users as the discovery process costs us and also impacts the servers on which users are hosting their website.
Hence, creating a content submission API is win-win for both of us as we don’t have to crawl all the pages and users can let us know about their new content.
After the announcement of Content Submission API at PubCon 2019, it was in private beta since then but in May 2021, its beta became live for all the webmasters.
Difference Between Bing’s URL and Content Submission API
This is not the first time; Bing has launched an API to let webmasters notify Bing about an added content.
Bing already has the URL Submission API from a while ago.
However, The Content Submission API is different from the URL submission API.
The URL Submission API allows us to only send the URLs for crawling or re-crawling. The Content Submission API, on the other hand, allows us to send both the URL as well as the other elements (HTML, Images) of a webpage on the go.
The benefit of using the Content Submission API is, it bypasses the need of crawling the content and lets us send our content directly to the search engine.
Now, after two and a half years, the Content Submission API is available to all the webmasters. And yes, it is out of Beta now.
Let’s learn now how to use it to index our website’s content faster on Bing.
How to Setup Bing Content Submission API on your website?
You can integrate Bing Content Submission API on your website via any of the two protocols listed below.
- XML Request
- JSON Request
You can read about the sample request for two protocols from this blog post.
If you are using a content management system, for example, WordPress, it has a plethora of plugins that use any of the above two protocols to use Bing Content Submission API to index a content faster on Bing.
Take the Bing URL Submissions Plugin as an example.
Other than that, Popular SEO Plugin “Rank Math” also has a feature to index your content faster on Bing by using the content submission API. The plugin team already has written a guide about the same that explains the same in detail.
Like Bing’s URL and Content Submission API to index a content faster on Bing, Google also has an Indexing API.
