I was recently contacted by an independent Canadian news publisher who is using Share News on Facebook. The tool allows them to get around Facebook’s filter on Canadian news. They came to me with an issue sharing new posts that I resolve here.
Problem. The publisher created a new post. The tool generated a Bing search link featuring just one result, a link to the news story. However, it was observed that the one result was to the publisher’s homepage instead of the specific news story. The result auto-corrected later that day.
Cause. Search engines like Bing may have a delay in indexing a new post, especially if it is on a website that is not Search Engine Optimized. The delay can be seconds, hours, or days.
Resolution 1. The publisher can perform SEO to speed up indexing, or they can index a new page manually by submitting it to the Bing URL Submission Tool. To use the tool, the publisher must sign-up for Bing’s Webmaster Tools and upload an XML file to their root directory. See this article for detailed steps.
Resolution 2. The tool has new option to generate a search link using Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” function. The advantage of using this option is that Google tends to index pages more quickly. However, the Lucky function uses a redirect to the first search results – redirects may generate warnings.
Published on July 7, 2024
Updated on October 26, 2024