The Bing Experince
Well I feel foolish. I wrote this based on my frustrations from a couple of weeks ago. I decided after writing this that I'd go back and see how Bing was doing and they crawled my site yesterday. Perhaps their servers took a Christmas and New Year's break. Who knows. But on their forums, Site indexing is the subject with the most posts.
Even though my site wasn't being indexed and the control panel summary profile wasn't showing that I was being indexed, the tab that showed sites that pointed to me and sites that I was pointing to was being shown. Go figure.
After several weeks of trying to get Bing to crawl my web site, I've yet to be crawled. The other two search engines that I submitted my sitemap to crawled my site within 24 hours. Bing doesn't even show the reason it's not being crawled.
I investigated the forums on Bing's site and found that this is a common problem. There are tons of suggestions on how to overcome the limitation and get Bing to crawl your site. Apparently, Bing relies on "backlinks" (other sites that link back to your site). There are nifty ideas on how to get this done which is signing on to forums that Bing does crawl and putting a link back to your site from there. Supposedly, that will get your site crawled. But when I searched my own site using the site: keyword and looked for site:fws.net I came up with several that linked to me. Obviously, Bing has those sites indexed, but has not, to date, indexed mine.
