Microsoft To Replace MSNBot With BingBot October 1, 2010

The Bing Search Blog announced that on October 1st, MSNBot will be renamed to BingBot. Bing has been testing a beta bot since November of last year. On October 1st, the beta label will be removed from the Bot name and it will be named BingBot. You should see the following useragent in your log […]

Chat with SearchBot

The Bing Search Blog announced that on October 1st, MSNBot will be renamed to BingBot.

Bing has been testing a beta bot since November of last year. On October 1st, the beta label will be removed from the Bot name and it will be named BingBot.

You should see the following useragent in your log files:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +https://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Note, if you already have directives for MSNBot in your robots.txt file, BingBot will obey those directives. It is important to note that if you have two different directives, one for MSNBot and one for BingBot and they say two different things, Microsoft will listen to BingBot over MSNBot.

For more information, see the Bing Search Blog.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.