Submitting an 'HTTPS' sitemap.xml to Bing

[cityxplora.com]

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?!

[cityxplora.com]

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

[Matthew_Edgar]

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.