MSNBot to Come Out of Beta with New Name Bingbot This October

Bing web crawler is soon going to have a new name. From October this year you won’t see msnbot 2.0b showing in your server logs. Instead you will see bingbot. Microsoft is going to drop beta designation for Bing crawler on October 1st and with that they are dropping the old name. It sounds kind a good with the new brand for search ;)
By the way, the webmasters wouldn’t have to worry too much. The new crawler will still obey the robots.txt written for old msnbot. But if you declare separate set of directives for bingbot, then the new directives will take precedence.
There’s a simple example on the Bing Community Blog:
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /folder1/

User-agent: msnbot
isallow: /folder1/
Disallow: /folder2/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
In that case Bing crawler will be able to crawl all the hosts except folder /folder1/. Pretty straight-forward, isn’t it?

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