: How long does Bingbot typically take to process a sitemap submission? I submitted a domain's sitemap.xml to Bingbot (in Webmaster Tools). It's been a couple of days but the status is still pending.

@Jennifer507

Dealing with Bing this week, I found out it works, but it's Webmaster tools are just very very delayed.

Two days after submitting sitemap, it has status pending, last crawl date is some strange date from the past, but in reality bingbot already searched my website.

I have access to my server logs, Bing was there already twice, it did some indexing too.

Apache log record for fetching my sitemap looks like this:

157.55.39.216 - - [05/Dec/2016:01:58:01 +0100] "GET /sitemap.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 63422 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"


I have seen two of thees, Bing searching also robots.txt and approximately third of my pages, all with status 200, which means OK, then it stopped.

Two days later, nothing in Webmaster tools yet, status pending event for sitemap submission, but my search results started to show in Bing.com search randomly. Once they showed up, me searching site:mywebsitename.com, five minutes later same query showed 0 results.

I tried to disavow link using their Disavow tool, link that mysteriously appears in Bing search results, something like mywebsitename.com/ppc/click/123456 a non existing page, I even made it throwing 404 for several weeks, two days later link still shows in search results.

Bing Webmaster tools are for patient people and everything takes time, it looks like they are not maintained any more.

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@Berryessa370

Found this in the Google Webmaster pages. I can imagine it also applies to Bing.


What is a robots failure?
This is an error to retrieve your site's robots.txt file. Before Googlebot crawls your site, and roughly once a day after that, Googlebot retrieves your robots.txt file to see which pages it should not be crawling. If your robots.txt file exists but is unreachable (in other words, if it doesn't return a 200 or 404 HTTP status code), we'll postpone our crawl rather than risk crawling URLs that you do not want crawled. When this happens, Googlebot will return to your site and crawl it as soon as we can successfully access your robots.txt file. More information about the robots exclusion protocol.
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35120?hl=en

that means, just submitting a sitemap.xml is not enough.
make sure you have your robots.txt

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@Sherry384

This post is 4 years old, hope the status in not Pending anymore. But this helped me.

After 14 days of pending status, I found this link, to PING bing with your sitemap. It's was a kind of awake call for my sitemap. Few hours later, my site was indexed.


Upload yous sitemap (but you already did hence the pending status)
Typ in your browser: www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap={full url to your sitemap)


You receive a response with something like this:
Thanks for submitting your Sitemap. Join the Bing Webmaster Tools to see your Sitemaps status and more reports on how you are doing on Bing.

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@Kristi941

There seems to be a problem with the sitemap submission process, going back at least to the beginning of last July. The last note on that thread was posted just a few days ago, saying no change in the commenter's situation. There are several other threads if you poke around, but that seems like the longest-running one and I've seen an employee refer people back to it, so it might be the one to watch if you want to track any developments.

Given that this is still occurring despite being identified as "minor" by JayGon, it looks like it's low priority and you'll just have to wait. Keep in mind, though, that sitemaps are primarily helpful suggestions to the search engines. As long as your pages are reachable via links somehow, they should still be indexed, etc.

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