Short: Bing Looking to Build A Crawl Tool for Bing Webmaster Tools
This is just a short bit I thought some of you SEO (Search Engine Optimization) folks and Webmasters may be interested in. If you're one in the growing number of individuals who take part in Bing Webmaster tools, now is your chance to get in on having your voice heard. On October 20, 2010, the Bing team posted a blog entry titled "Looking for Input on Crawl Delay" wherein they are interested in obtaining your feedback on the following points:
Today, we fully support crawl delay which is specified in robots.txt. We are considering creating a tool which allows you to directly control the frequency, and perhaps even the timing, of msnbot/bingbot. A few questions:
1. Do you prefer for us to continue to support crawl-delay in robots.txt?
2. Would you like to be able to control the crawl rate based on time of day?
A. What are the ranges of crawl rate you would like to see if you had control over the time of day? B. Would you want to turn crawling on/off by time, or just specify different crawl rates based on the time of day?
3. If you had this ability to directly control the crawl rate through a webmaster tool, how often would you adjust the settings?
4. If we built this tool, would you like it to control our fetching directly, or would you rather have the tool output the proper robots.txt entries which you then insert into your robots.txt file?
Now, I know that most of you reading this either love to bag on Bing or you're only familiar with hearing bad things about Bing, but if you haven't taken a look at their Webmaster tools, I highly recommend you check them out. Even if you hate Bing for whatever reason, their Webmaster tools are pretty awesome. Not to mention, I think there's something to be said for them reaching out to their adopters to obtain feedback in this manner. And for as much as I like Google, I like the prospect of competition for Google even more and I see Bing in a prime position to do just that. But I digress.
If you're interested in contributing your feedback, feel free to do so here via the comments below, via the original post on the Bing team's blog, or via the following email address provided by Bing: bwmc@microsoft.com