Bing introduced that it’s altering the consumer agent string that identifies itself as Bingbot. Now there will likely be two consumer brokers, one for desktop and one other for the cell crawler.
The brand new consumer agent gives extra info, together with the newest model of Edge.
Consumer Brokers
A consumer agent is a message from a software program that tells the web site server what sort of software program system is visiting it.
A consumer agent can inform a web site that it’s a browser or a search engine bot.
Some web site software program and SaaS purposes depend on the consumer agent with a view to establish search bots and do one thing like maintain them from visiting the search or registration pages.
Bing Consumer Agent Change is a Transition
Microsoft will proceed to make use of the outdated bingbot crawler consumer agent till Fall 2022, which is a imprecise date.
Nonetheless, the Bing Webmaster Instruments URL inspection device has already converted to the brand new bingbot consumer agent.
There are apps and software program that will want updating, so this offers them a number of months to replace their software program in order that they will precisely establish bingbot.
However there is no such thing as a must replace a robots.txt as a result of the brand new model can proceed to be addressed within the robots.txt as bingbot.
Robots.txt won’t must be up to date to accommodate the brand new bingbot consumer agent string.
Nonetheless, for software program and providers that do partial matches, akin to phpBB, updating code to accommodate the brand new consumer agent won’t be mandatory.
If a writer, app or software program makes use of bingbot/ to establish bingbot with a partial map then that code will proceed to work.
Previous and New Consumer Brokers
That is the outdated bingbot consumer agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (appropriate; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
The brand new bingbot consumer brokers are an enchancment as a result of they establish between the desktop and cell variations of the Microsoft Bing net crawler.
These are the brand new bingbot consumer brokers:
Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; appropriate; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Cellular
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Construct/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Cellular Safari/537.36 (appropriate; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
In keeping with the official Microsoft Bing announcement:
“We are going to fastidiously take a look at web sites earlier than switching them to our new user-agent Bing Webmaster Instruments URL Inspection has already began utilizing the brand new desktop user-agent for the Dwell URL Check that can assist you examine potential points.
In case you face any challenges be at liberty to contact us.”
Quotation
Learn the official Microsoft Bing Announcement
