Reach Millions of Shoppers with Bing Image Data Feeds

In our April Webmaster post, we showed marking up your data increases exposure of your content to over 100M users of Bing and its partners.  Today, we are excited to deepen our relationship with webmasters and site owners by accepting image data feeds of your site content.

Data feeds are the best way to influence how your content is presented in search results. For example, providing item purchase data enables the recently announced Places to Buy experience (learn more) for your image. Data feeds enable rapid awareness of new and changed content, ensuring search results linking to your site are up-to-date. They also offer the flexibility to expose metadata not within your page HTML. These all help generate more traffic volume.

It’s Easy To Setup A Feed

Bing is able to pull data directly from your servers. We accept 2 types of feeds for simplicity:

  1. Direct data file: Object metadata is tied to page and image URLs and presented in data files. This type may be a sitemap or a more robust data feed.
  2. 2-step data sharing: A sitemap is first shared to list all the page URLs that contain images.  Bing then uses the URLs to query a specified metadata endpoint (OEmbed, RSS, etc) to retrieve comprehensive metadata.

We offer flexibility on feed and schema formats:

The Bing Image data feed schema is based on schema.org.  The more metadata provided in the data feed, the richer the experience we can enable.

How do I start?

Please contact us to discuss more details such as scheduling, metadata richness, validation, and more.

As a tip, when creating a sitemap, adding an indication of importance can be very helpful.  For example, a webmaster can split sitemaps by activity where heavily trafficked URLs are included in frequently updated sitemap1 while less active URLs are in a separate sitemap2.  This helps Bing understand which URLs it should prioritize crawling first.

We will continue to evolve our data feed ingestion system. We value your feedback on how we can make this process easier and use your content to drive high quality referral traffic. We look forward to hearing from you.

– The Bing Image Search team