Submitting an 'HTTPS' sitemap.xml to Bing
-
I have been trying to submit my sitemap to Bing [via their webmaster tools] for well over a week and it continues to report 'pending' My site is HTTPS and the sitemap is accepted by Google. I questioned Bing about this and got this response:
To set your expectations, our Sitemap fetchers use a different pipeline and because of this, we cannot crawl Sitemaps in HTTPS format. We require that you submit an HTTP version of sitemap in order for Bing to properly crawl the file. Please go ahead and delete the current Sitemap and resubmit a new one in HTTP.
Currently I don't and can't have a HTTP version of my site & sitemap and my developers are telling me that 3hrs worth of dev time will go into coming up with a work-around which I'm not sure I want to invest in [I have more important things to concentrate my spend on!].
Has anyone been faced with this problem and is there any quick/cheap alternative or do I just accept that Bing won't crawl my site until they update their end?!
-
Hi Matthew, your response makes perfect sense. Thankfully Bing [seems to be!!] indexing my site - well certainly the pages that count as we are showing up in search results. We've been trying to come up with a work-around but all solutions will involve an element of dev. time which I don't really think is money well spent - at the moment anyway!
Cheers
Iain
-
Hey Iain. If it were me, I'd probably just accept that Bing can't crawl the sitemap and let it go. XML sitemaps are important, but not something that will generally make a huge life altering difference for your website's performance.
Now, I say "probably" because I'm wondering if you are having indexing problems with Bing. Are there pages you want Bing to index that maybe they can't reach easily (or at all) without an XML sitemap? If that is the case, then maybe it is worth the 3 hours of dev time to get the XML sitemap in place. Alternatively, you could find other ways to link to those pages Bing isn't currently indexing (on your site or others) to get those pages noticed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Explore by site - Site overview's servers
Hello, When I want to "Explore by site" and make a "Site overview", I have only 4 choices for the region : USA United Kingdom Canada Australia But the location of my business is in Chile.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sodimaccl
Does this have any repercussion or negative impact in the analytics ? Thank you.0 -
Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?
I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.
Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli0 -
How does switching to HTTPS effect Google Analytics?
We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Pro's & Con's of Wordpress Categorys & Tags
Good Afternoon! I touched on this question a while back in another post specifically regarding a plethora of duplicate pages that I was finding due to inappropriate tagging in wordpress. As I am going through our website, I am starting to notice it happening again with categories as well. I am including some pictures where you can see the URL structures and titles etc of how everything is laid out. I would like to clarify that I was not the one who did any of this Is it wrong/bad to cross categorize? What I mean by that is put something in more than one category? Would there be any drawback to converting any of these into subcategories? Would that even do anything? Does having two pages that are named the same thing, hurt you? It would seem to me that Google wouldn't like that. I have recently come into the field of thought that Google is getting more and more human, and If it makes a human uncomfortable/confused it will make Google confused. In my pictures you can see we clearly have numerous hard copies of the same thing, not just duplicate elements created by wordpress, that is a separate issue. I personally want to change all of the titles and make everything as different and individual as possible, but i also could be very wrong in my desire to do that. Any thoughts are appreciated! eY4iX2N N3AVqss JZpU7Rq
Reporting & Analytics | | HashtagHustler0 -
Why would our client's site be receiving significant levels of organic traffic for a keyword they do not rank for?
We have a client that has received 100+ organic visits for the keyword 'airport transfers', yet the site does not rank in the top 100 search results for this keyword. We have checked that it is not untagged PPC traffic. Truly baffling. Can anybody help?
Reporting & Analytics | | mrdavidingram0 -
Homepage disappeared from Google's index
The Title says it all..I just discovered that the Homepage is not in Google's index anymore. Homepage rankings have plummeted, our top keywords are nowhere to be found but most of keywords from deeper pages have dropped just one or two places. We just change the website design and some content but I strongly believe this is definitely something else due to the fact that it all happened so fast! There is one thing that I have to mention that might have been caused all this..our email client (Outlook) is using a lot of resources from our server and for the last couple of days the website was down quite a lot.
Reporting & Analytics | | echo1
There are some crawling errors in GWT but the homepage has been crawled because is not there, no other messages. Where should I look for?0 -
404 errors on page urls that don't even exist
I am getting a lot of errors on pages with urls that aren't even legit. Like for example: /videos/support/index.asp No such path even exists like this on the site. I have a /videos and /support off root but no place on the site is there any reference or file at location /videos/support/index.asp so I get a lot of 404 duplicate page errors. This is just one example of several. How do I stop this?
Reporting & Analytics | | GKLWL0 -
Can't figure this ranking out..
Hi, This is puzzling me. I've been in the second/third position for a week or so for my best keyword. That is for Google US unpersonalized, which is the one that brings more traffic, as far as I understand. It can't get MUCH better. Well, I can be first, but second and third position is really awesome in my case (highly competitive keyword according to SEOMOZ PRO). Then, why on earth my traffic for that keyword was 8 times better a year ago?? I mean, a year ago I received an average of 800 visits per day and now I can barely reach 90 visits per day being in the second / third place. Visits can't increase from 90 to 800 just for increasing one spot. I've never seen in my stats such drop in my rankings. I thought that due to google updates my site was sent below the 20th position or something. But my I was shocked today when I saw that I still have the second/third position Am I crazy or this looks wrong? The page title and description that shows in google hasn't changed, so people looking for that keyword are seeing the same as one year ago. It is not a seasonal or time sensitive keyword. My best guess is that people are now always logged in and results are personalized. Don't know much about personalized results but I don't think you can optimize much for those. If that's the case, then how on earth can we optimize a page if everybody is using personalized results? Is there a way to improve your rankings in those cases? Thanks, Enrique
Reporting & Analytics | | enriquef0