Via Search Engine Roundtable comes news of refreshing candor from a Bing employee about the performance of Bing’s crawler, which is still referred to as MSNbot. The admission happened yesterday in the Bing Webmaster Center forums, when Brett Yount, a program manager for Bing, replied to a question about why Bing has only indexed one page from a sitemap that was submitted six weeks ago.

(In case the image is difficult to read, Brett Yount’s statement is: “It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow. I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do.”)

When Bing introduced MSNbot 2.0b in November, it promised the new bot would “do a better job” of crawling the web. It apparently hasn’t sped up much, at least not yet.

Comments like this make Bing an easy target for sarcastic replies, but I find the honesty refreshing. It’s better to have statements like this than PR jargon that ignores or downplays the real situation.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Top News

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee