seoFool.com

By John Elder

Two days ago, Microsoft announced the retirement of the original MSN Bot 1.1 on the Bing Community web site. It will be replaced with the new MSN Bot 2.0b.

Apparently the new bot is fully operational at this time, but webmasters should start to see the new guy show up in server logs by the end of the week.

That means that this old standard server log entry:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Will be seen in your log files no more. Now you can expect to see…..drum roll please………

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Woohoo. Ok, so this is totally boring but it’s still worth knowing. Apparently, according to Bing, this new bot is quote:

“…a major milestone for the Bing engineering team”

Um, ok. I’m sure it’s very nice. :-) And now I’m really curious what the “b” stands for…anyone know? That’s gonna nag at me…

You can learn about robots.txt control of this new critter, err, bot at this page.

People have been complaining lately of some weird crawling of the old MSN bot, things like the bot crawling sites hundreds of times per day, or not at all, etc. Hopefully this new bot will behave itself a little better. If not, here’s a link to a page that explains how to limit the crawls rate of the MSN bot here. But really, I’m sure the new bot will behave itself.

Finally, if you want to keep up to date on all this geeky, uh…I mean sexy, Bing Webmaster stuff, you can subscribe to their blog here.

SO! MSN BOT 1.1……FAREWELL…..WE SALUTE YOU!!

Enjoy you’re retirement. Have fun baggin FemBots, but be careful…sure, they look really freaking hot- but you never know, so be sure to run your anti-virus!

Slutty Fembot

Comment Below…

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe for free to the seoFool.com Magazine where I bundle up all the articles that I write each week into a cool glossy pdf file and email it to you, along with any neat freebies that I come across during the week.