14 DAY TRIAL // October 1st, 2010 was not synonymous with the death of t6he old crawler associated with Microsoft’s search engine, despite the company’s previous announcements. It appears that the software giant has had a small change of heart, and is allowing MSNBot to survive a little longer, although it is moving ahead with its plans to kill the crawler.
As of October 1st, Microsoft has started rolling out Bingbot, the new crawler which will from now on be associated with Bing.
Obviously, Bingbot is designed to replace MSNBot, but rather than make this change all at once, the Redmond company has opted to phase out the older crawler, as the new version is introduced gradually.
It appears that feedback from webmasters has cause Microsoft to opt for phasing out MSNBot instead of pulling the plug on the crawler in a single move.
“Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit,” revealed Fabrice Canel - Senior Program Manager, Bing.
“Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout. What does that mean to you? To start, you will continue to see traffic mostly from msnbot.
Then, over the next few weeks, you may start to see bingbot traffic.”
But make no mistake about it, although MSNBot received a reprieve from Microsoft, it will still be replaced with Bingbot, a move which was announced in the past, when the company started testing the Beta version of the new crawler.
At this point in time the transition from MSNBot to Bingbot is in full swing, and webmasters should start seeing less and less traffic from the aging crawler in the coming weeks.
“This transition period is designed to provide time for us to validate consistency, and provide you time to catch and fix potential issues with our new crawler. At the end of this transition period, bingbot will replace most of the msnbot traffic.
“It is important to note that during this transition you should not experience a significant increase of the total crawl traffic from msnbot and bingbot for any extended period of time,” Canel added.