Does Bing Allow Image Sitemaps Like Google?

Question

Does Bing allow images in their sitemaps like Google?

Please see the Google example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"&gt;
  <url> 
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html&lt;/loc&gt; 
    <image:image>
       <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg&lt;/image:loc&gt; 
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

Answer 1

It's Google the only search engine currently which supports Image sitemaps. The other search engines may successfully parse these sitemaps but they will likely ignore the tags related to the Image sitemap extension.

Note that in your example there's an error, and is likely that this is what causes parsing difficulties for Bing. The Image schema hub is located at http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/

That is, you need to replace the following bit:

xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"

with

xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"