Come October 1st 2010, Bing will be finally converting its bot name from MSNbot to the new and improved Bingbot name which just makes sense. Hardly link building specific news, but I might as well prepare as many as possible so they’re ready to track when it’s switched over. The Bingbot will be interesting to see how it acts and handles my network of websites, so bring it on and bring on more Bing traffic!
On October 1st, 2010, we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft’s new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:
From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com
will become
From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com
Related Reading:
Bing Crawler: Bingbot On The Horizon via Bing Webmaster Central
Bingbot Talk on Webmaster World via WebmasterWorld.com
