As a new blogger, I keep learning new tricks.
I noticed that I have more posts coming up in Google than Bing and DuckDuckGo. I can actually see exactly how many of my posts and pages are indexed by each search engine by searching on sites:thingsitried.com
I went to my trusty LLM—ChatGPT-4o— and asked what to do. It suggested that I use Bing Webmaster Tools.
So I searched that up, did the required registering and got to where I had to prove that I am the owner of the website.
I tried letting it get my website details from Google Search Console, as that seemed like a convenient option.
For some reason, that didn’t work. I am guessing it has something to do with which Google account I was logged in as. I thought I chose the right one, but suffice to say, it couldn’t find any websites for me.
I was kind of bummed out about that. It seemed a little intrusive giving Bing so much access to my Google Search Console in the first place, and then it didn’t even work.
I moved on to another method of verification. I downloaded a file named BingSiteAuth.xml, and then uploaded that to the home directory of thingsitried.com.
After I uploaded that, I returned to Bing Webmaster Tools and hit the verification button. It worked.
As I did with Google Search Console a while back, I submitted my sitemaps. BTW, I used the Yoast SEO Plugin—free version—to generate my sitemaps.
Bing was actually better about detecting them fairly quickly. I remember GSC said it couldn’t fetch them, but after a few days it did fetch them. Just transient weirdness I guess.
From my prior experience going through this process with Google I knew that I should not expect all of my pages and posts to immediately show up in the search engine just because it said it successfully found my sitemap.
But when I submitted URLs for individual posts to GSC manually using their “URL Inspection” tool, they started showing up in actual searches within a day or so.
I tried the same idea on the Bing Webmaster Tools. They also call it “URL Inspection”, but it works a little different.
The first URL I entered went in with no problem. But then I tried to put in some older posts…
Bing informed me that there were some errors. On of my first posts didn’t have a meta description.
Although I have website experience, it’s really been a long time since my very limited excursions into WordPress. I was struggling with a lot of details when I first set this blog up. In fact, I am still working on details.
I know the importance of a meta description, but I didn’t think to check that I had one. I was assuming that WordPress was handling a lot of details like that for me.
In fact, I was kind of right. Because later posts did have meta descriptions. It was just the early ones that lacked them.
I am guessing it had to do with turning on the Yoast SEO plugin. I’m sure I didn’t have that at the beginning.
But turning on Yoast did not solve all the problems. Most of my newer posts have been flagged by Bing Webmaster as “Meta Description too long or too short.”
It’s funny that they couldn’t be bothered to tell you whether it is too long or too short, but some research revealed that you should strive for 150-160 characters. Many of mine are too long.
BTW, you can see your meta description if you look at your source code. Go to your webpage in a browser and right-click on the page, then select “view page source.” Then do a find through the source code (Ctrl-F on Windows) for “description”
You should find a line something like this:
<meta property=”og:description” content=”Welcome to Things I Tried—a blog for honest reviews and firsthand experiences with restaurants, products, services, and technology.” />
Hopefully you don’t see something like:
<meta name=”description” content=””>
<!– Yoast SEO: No meta description found for this page. –>
My meta descriptions (for posts) take the title and add on an excerpt, then the category. They are coming out too long. Many are over 200 characters.
I have been using long titles and apparently big excerpts.
Now I guess I should shorten up my titles and change the length of the auto-generated excerpts. But I could also use the (usually empty) box in the right sidebar of my Edit Post screen “Excerpt: WRITE AN EXCERPT (OPTIONAL)“
I tried writing one in there and republishing and it worked. Bing Webmaster’s error disappeared. Viewing the source code revealed that it used the text I typed, combined with the title and category.
The sitewide way to try to shorten up my titles and meta descriptions is to go to Yoast SEO > Settings and change the variables that are included there for SEO title and Meta description.
I had Title Page Separator Site title and then for some reason, a percent sign character. BTW, the Page variable only displays if it is a numbered page, which posts are not. In order to shorten my titles, I changed the SEO title to just Title and Page.
I kind of want my site title in there, but I have to be realistic about SEO. My titles tend to be long already. I guess I’d rather decide what to put in the title and not be hamstrung by always fitting in my site name.
For Meta description I had Title: Excerpt – Primary Category. As much trouble as I had with long titles, I had a lot more trouble with meta descriptions being too long. Bing is really hard on my meta descriptions. I guess it’s fairly obvious to just not repeat the Title. It is already in the search result anyhow.
ChatGPT seems to think there are good reasons for including the Title in the meta description, but the tradeoff on valuable characters may not be worth it. Many SEO plugins include it by default, as did my Yoast SEO plugin. It’s time to get rid of it though.
My meta description is now down to just Excerpt – Primary Category.
Bing Webmaster Tool also caught a few images with no alternative text. As an experienced web admin, I know how important it is to have alt text on all of your images. And not just any text. Relevant text.
I’m very glad Bing Webmaster caught these. I corrected them, and in the process, learned a little bit more about the places where you can do this adding.
I had been adding alt text in the sidebar of the Edit Post screen, but you can also do it in the Media Library. That is surely a more convenient place to go through everything and make sure it all has relevant alt text.
With all these tweaks, it time to see if I can get Bing to index a bunch more of my posts.
UPDATE 2025-02-19:
Bing did start indexing a few more of my posts, but not all of the posts I submitted.
Then a couple of days later, they seem to have removed all of my posts. Ugh!
Bing Webmaster Tools has two “High Severity” recommendations. I guess they are errors. Under “Recommendations” tab is listed “Error details”.
The first one labelled High Severity says:
“Learn how IndexNow boosts site visibility with easy setup.”
I click on that and it just seems like they would like me to use IndexNow, and to set it up with WordPress, my easiest option seems to be Yoast.
I was already using the free version of Yoast, but in order to use this IndexNow, I have to pay about $100/year for Yoast Premium.
I went through all that and I now have IndexNow set up. It took me an hour.
I don’t really see how that was a high severity error. Oh well.
The second high severity error says:
“The description is missing in the head section of the page.”
The page count for that error is 1, so apparently, I have 1 page that doesn’t have a meta description.
I am probably not going to obsess with trying to get Bing to bring back my posts. I actually have a day job and other things to do.
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