Back in December of 2008, we alerted you to the possibility that you might start seeing our new web crawler in your referrer logs. Given the recent excitement around the arrival of Bing, we wanted to take a moment to update you on the latest bot news.
As we said earlier, you will see the new Bing crawler user agent string listed as:
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm).
Note that we didn’t change the bot’s name for Bing. You’ll also see the previous version of the bot as well —
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
— which is still in use, as of today, as Bing’s primary user agent.
We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.
We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try! As such, we wanted to preemptively alert folks to the most effective way to report bot and crawling issues to Bing’s support team in case they arise. If you have any feedback for us on either the existing or the new MSNBot, or on any other matters pertaining to crawling your website, please post your comments and questions in our crawling/indexing forum. Our Webmaster Center forums moderator will follow-up with you ASAP. Please include in your forum post the identity of the user agent that is the source of your concern so we can help you that much faster. Thank you!
-- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
A new bot version isn't the most useful piece of information, but at least you guys are working hard. Keep up the good work!
Worth noting...The Bing team wants us to know they are hard at work but we need to keep an eye on our
Awsome! Go bing.. Keep up the progress.
Curious, why will this new bot will be better?
Ever since this new bot was mentioned at MSDN Webmaster Blog, I still see only the regular MSNBot and MSN Media in my log stats. I use Awstats and I feel it's not current on the activities of this new crawler.
I am seeing MSN Bot in my log stats too
And I have been anticipating that MSN bot ultimately be rechristened as BINGot or Bing bot.
They appear to have several versions of the bot running, for reasons that have yet to be explained.
But I believe we are seeing a new era of Good Citizenship when it comes to bots, where companies are accountable for the bandwidth their bots consume and the method they are used.
keep up the progress for seo bing
They are still using the older version ie. MSNBOT 1.1, there is no clarification that when they will start using MNSBOT 2.0 fully..
Hello Bing Community,
I have recently noticed that some of my traffic is coming from bing.com and the users land on my home page rather than the subpages. The other search engines like google sends the traffic to both home page and subpages as well. Wondering, why bing.com doesn't send any traffic to the subpages on my site?
Does anyone get traffic to their both home and sub pages from bing.com?
Thanks
sounds interesting can't wait for the see what's improved
A Bing thread has two complaints from webmasters on Microsoft's newish crawler, MSNBot 2. The bot, in some cases, might be adding a pound sign (#) to the end of the URLs. Now, this might not be the fault of...
I don't see this is a huge problem until the search engines start seeing the # sign as an actually portion of the url and indexing them. Currently, and correct me if I am wrong, but anything after a # sign is not seen by the engines and therefor really poses no threat to seo.
It will certainly be interesting to discover what msnbot/2.0 does that msnbot/1.1 doesn’t. Keep up the great work Bing team…Bing is a vast improvement over Live!
