Bing Webmaster Tools: What to Fix First (Our Own Report)

Open Recommendations in Bing Webmaster Tools and work from high severity down: set up IndexNow, lengthen meta descriptions that are too short, fix images without alt text, and remove sitemaps that return errors. Most of it is one day of work. Backlinks are the only item without a quick fix. On 8 November 2026 we ran our own site through it: 61 issues on 59 pages, almost all from one cause in our code, fixed and live the same day.

Why bother with Bing

Bing brings us far less traffic than Google: between 27 August and 5 November 2026, wedodevwork.com got 21 clicks from about 1,000 Bing impressions. But Bing's index is used by more than bing.com. When Bing's search API went down in May 2024, Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT's web search went down with it. If people ask an AI assistant for a developer, a webshop builder or a WordPress fix, a clean entry in Bing's index helps.

Bing Webmaster Tools is free. If you already use Google Search Console, you can import your site from there in a minute.

What our report said

Issue	Severity	Pages
IndexNow is not set up	High	Whole site
Meta descriptions too short	Moderate	58
Not enough inbound links from high-quality domains	Moderate	Whole site
An image without an alt attribute	Low	1

The Sitemaps page showed one more problem that is not in the recommendations: two old sitemaps from a WordPress site we only ran for a few weeks, both with errors.

1. Set up IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol: you tell search engines which pages are new or changed, and they recrawl them instead of waiting for their next visit. One submission is shared between all participating engines: Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep and Amazon. Google does not use it, so keep your sitemap for Google.

It takes two pieces:

1. A key file. Generate a random key (32 hexadecimal characters is fine) and publish it as a text file at the root of your site, for example https://www.example.com/<key>.txt, containing only the key. The key is not a secret: it only proves the submissions come from the site owner.
2. A submission. POST the changed URLs to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow:

{"host": "www.example.com", "key": "<key>", "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/<key>.txt", "urlList": ["https://www.example.com/en/blogs/new-post"]}

Up to 10,000 URLs fit in one request. WordPress, Shopify apps and several CDNs offer IndexNow as a plugin or a switch; on a custom site it is a small script. Ours runs after every blog post goes live, for all five language versions.

Our first submission of all 784 URLs in our sitemap came back with 403 SiteVerificationNotCompleted: the key file had only just been deployed. Ten minutes later the same request was accepted with a 200. So if you get a 403 right after setup, wait and retry before you debug. Submitting does not guarantee indexing; it makes the crawl come sooner.

2. Fix short meta descriptions at the source

Bing flagged 58 pages. They were almost all our service pages, and the cause was one line of code: the page used the short card text from the service overview, 60 to 100 characters, as its meta description. Every service had a longer description in the database that nobody used for search.

Before changing anything we measured every URL in our sitemap. Of 784 pages, 182 had a meta description under 120 characters and 178 had one over 160, which search results cut off. Bing only reported the short ones.

The fix had three parts:

• Use the longer text. Service pages now take whichever text is longer, the card or the description.
• Fit it to 160 characters. One helper cuts any description to whole sentences when they reach at least 120 characters, otherwise at the last word, with an ellipsis. Every page goes through it, so the over-long ones are fixed too.
• Rewrite the rest by hand. Six pages had their own short text in the translation files: blogs, contact, jobs, products, the services overview and UX/UI design. We rewrote those in all five languages to 140 to 160 characters.

Result: 153 of the 180 service page versions in four languages now have a description of 140 to 160 characters. Aim for 150 to 160 characters that say what the page offers and for whom, in the page's language.

3. Check the alt text warning on the live page first

Bing listed one Dutch blog post with an image without an alt attribute. When we opened the live page, every image had one: the content had been fixed after Bing's last scan. Reports are snapshots, so check the current page before you fix anything.

The rule itself: images that carry information get an alt text that describes them; decorative images (icons, background shapes) get an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them. Leaving the attribute out entirely is what gets flagged.

4. Remove sitemaps that no longer exist

Our site ran on WordPress for only a few weeks before it was rebuilt, yet Bing still remembered sitemap_index.xml and page-sitemap.xml from that time, both returning errors. Delete them on the Sitemaps page and keep one sitemap per host. Also check that robots.txt points to the sitemap that exists today.

5. Backlinks: no quick fix, and don't buy them

"Not enough inbound links from high-quality domains" is a fair point for most small business sites, ours included. There is no setting for it. What works slowly: useful content that others link to, listings with real partners, clients and associations, and case studies that clients share. Bought links are a risk with Bing and Google alike.

Check your own site in 30 minutes

1. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, or import it from Google Search Console.
2. Open Recommendations and sort by severity.
3. Check that https://yourdomain/<key>.txt exists, or switch on IndexNow in your platform or CDN.
4. Look at the meta descriptions Bing lists: is it one template or one field that causes all of them? Fix that one place.
5. Open Sitemaps and delete anything with errors that you no longer publish.

For what to build into a site from day one, read our SEO guide for developers. If your site has become slow, see what to do when your website is slow.

Want us to fix it?

Start with our website check, or send us your domain through contact. Fixes like these are usually a few hours of work, which you can pay by the hour or from a strip card of 14 hours ($1,050).