Microsoft announced that MSNBot 2, which is currently in beta, may be ramped up a lot more and webmasters might begin to notice the new bot in their log files. The new bot has been out there since December 2008, and the useragent is just about the same as the original bot.

New Bot:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Current Bot:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

MSNBot 1.1 was released in February 2008, promising a more “efficient crawl.” MSNBot 2 is also promising an even more efficient crawl. Microsoft warns:

We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.

There have been some potential errors already spotted. I did notice some reports of MSNBot 2.0 adding pound signs to the end of the URLs. I am not sure if this is a crawler bug or webmaster bug. So be on the lookout for the new bot and if you see any issues, feel free to report them at the Bing forums.

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing SEO

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz