How to decrease the crawl rate of Bing's search engine bot?

The MSN bot or BING bot crawls your website to index your website’s content and show the results under the Bing search engine.

Bing supports the directives of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) which can be listed in a site’s robots.txt file.

The crawl rate of this bot can be controlled using this robots.txt file. To decrease the crawl rate you, add the following content inside the file:

User-agent: bingbot
Crawl-delay: 1

The following two crawlers are also used for some crawling duties: MSNBot (general resources) and MSNBot-Media (images and video).

The corresponding user agent are:

msnbot
msnbot-media

Bing recommends using the lowest possible value for the crawl delay. Here is a list of values which you can use on your website:

• No crawl delay set – Normal
• 1 – Slow
• 5 – Very Slow
• 10 – Extremely Slow

An alternative method of managing the Bing crawl rate for your website is to register for Bing’s webmaster tools and set up your settings there.

Crawl Rate FAQs

1. What is a crawl rate in SEO?
   Crawl rate in SEO refers to the speed at which search engine bots (like Bingbot) visit and crawl the pages of your website. It can impact your site’s visibility on search engine result pages.
2. How does a high crawl rate affect a website?
   A high crawl rate can strain your server resources, potentially leading to slower website performance. It may also cause frequent indexing of your pages, which can affect your SEO strategy.
3. Can I completely block Bing’s bot from crawling my site?
   While you can use the robots.txt file to control Bingbot’s access to your site, completely blocking it is not advisable, as it may hinder your website’s visibility on Bing’s search engine.
4. Why is mobile-friendly design important for crawl rate?
   The mobile-friendly design ensures that your website is accessible and user-friendly on mobile devices. Since Bingbot also crawls mobile content, a mobile-friendly design can positively impact crawl efficiency.
5. How often should I update my website’s content to influence the crawl rate?
   The frequency of content updates depends on your industry and audience. Regularly adding high-quality, relevant content can signal to Bingbot the need for more frequent crawling.