Verifying a GitHub Pages site with Bing Webmaster Tools (no DNS needed)
Bing Webmaster Tools also feeds DuckDuckGo and Yahoo results, so submitting a sitemap there covers more ground than just Google — worth doing once a sitemap already exists. The usual way to prove ownership of a site is a DNS TXT record, but that assumes you control the domain's DNS. A username.github.io site doesn't give you that (GitHub owns the DNS zone), so the DNS method is a dead end here.
The fallback that does work for GitHub Pages: a static meta tag on the homepage. Bing Webmaster Tools gives you a code like:
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="B109FF34ED264CD7CDA115D1B13A4C7F">
which just needs to appear in index.html's <head> — no verification file upload, no DNS access required, and importantly no JavaScript, so it doesn't add any tracking behavior to the page. I added it as one more constant in the build script, alongside the description and canonical tags already generated there:
BING_VERIFICATION_CODE = "B109FF34ED264CD7CDA115D1B13A4C7F"
templated into index.html only — Bing's instructions specifically ask for the homepage, not every page.
One detail worth remembering: this tag only proves ownership. It doesn't submit anything by itself — after Bing confirms the tag is live and you click "Verify," you still go to the Sitemaps section and paste in the sitemap URL separately. The two steps are independent.
Created 2026-09-05T05:21:14+02:00 · Edit