Since the new Bing Webmaster Tools has come into being a couple of months ago, I have been facing a persistent problem adding the sitemap for my Blogger blog http://vijaypadiyar.blogspot.com to my account on Bing Webmaster Tools. The tool either times out or otherwise refreshes the page without adding the sitemap.

I have tried with all three sitemap options that Blogger offers (atom.xml, rss.xml and feeds/posts/default), but the problem persists in each case (see image below).

A simple Google search reveals that I am not the only one facing this problem. There are at least a couple of others who have reported similar issues.

There is also a SSL issue that pops up every now and then while navigating through sections of Bing Webmaster Tools, forcing me to log off and back in. An error message that says SSL followed by a string of numbers is displayed on the screen (see image below), and you cannot revert to normal operation by clicking on the Back or Refresh buttons.

There is also another issue with the sitemap for this website http://www.vijaypadiyar.in. Bing crawls this sitemap very infrequently, about once a month or even less (see image below). I had raised that issue as well, and that seems to have been resolved.

I have raised the issue with Bing on both their Facebook page as well as their Twitter page. They have replied on Twitter saying that the issue has been forwarded to their technical team for analysis. I haven’t heard back from them on the issue since.

UPDATE:

Bing replied to my messages on both Facebook and Twitter saying that they have forwarded my feedback to their technical team.

@Bing: @VijayPadiyar Thanks for your feedback! We’ll pass this along to the team.

This was followed by another one a few days later asking me to watch out for a “Facebook message from them,” something I never received!

Bnd about 15 days later, I saw that I was able to add at least my Atom sitemap (atom.xml) to Bing Webmaster Tools, something which was not happening earlier.

However, don’t get your hopes too high. It’s been about 3 weeks since I added my Atom sitemap, but Bing Webmaster Tools hasn’t crawled my site yet. This is the other problem I mentioned above.

Bing really needs to get their act together if they even dream of being on par with Google Webmaster Tools someday!