There are currently a “large number of failures” associated with Bing’s new URL submissions plugin for WordPress, according to the company’s outreach team.
Emails are being sent out to site owners who have installed the plugin to notify them of these issues.
The email reads:
“I am contacting you from the Microsoft Corporation and its Internet search engine Bing in regards to our URL submissions WordPress plugin.
Our systems have alerted us that while you have installed the plugin, there seems to be a large number of failures in submission of URLs to our index, resulting in customers not seeing your domain on priority in the index and with full functionality.
We would be happy to help and debug any problems you might be facing, so as to allow our search engine to index your content and provide additional relevant traffic to your site via our search results.
The first step in resolving the issue is to check if the API key has been entered properly. Please check this blog for more information and step by step process of generating and integrating the API key.
Next, please reach out to us after this step with the error details and the problems faced by you pre-integration of the plugin and we will provide the solution accordingly.”
A screenshot of this email was shared by Mathias Noyez on Twitter.
Bing’s Frédéric Dubut confirms the legitimacy of the email in a reply to the tweet:
“Yes @BingWMC PMs are reaching out directly to webmasters when we detect some of these issues. They’re looking particularly for issues related to the WP plugin since it’s been launched just recently.”
It’s unclear at this time whether the issues are strictly related to installation of the API key, of if issues would persist with proper installation.
Bing’s URL submissions plugin for WordPress just launched last week to quite a bit of interest from SEOs and site owners.
At this time there are already over 1,000 installs of the plugin, which shows that it’s proving to be relatively popular.
It’s important for site owners who installed this plugin to be aware of the issues, as their content may not be getting indexed as quickly as advertised.
That’s not to say content will not eventually get indexed after Bing discovers it on its own. The failures of the plugin do not totally prevent content from being indexed.
But it won’t be indexed immediately, which is the reason to install the plugin in the first place.
To that end, there’s no danger involved with installing the plugin.
Be particularly careful when it comes to providing the API key, and perhaps check on your next few pieces of content to see if they’re getting indexed right away.
For what it’s worth, the plugin has received more good reviews than bad so far. It’s currently sitting at an average of 4.2 out of 5 stars.
One of the reviews states: “Does the work efficiently. All links get indexed automatically.”
Another one simply states the plugin “works like a charm.”
So the plugin is clearly working for some. Maybe the issues are just related to the API key?
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