bing webmaster

According to the information provided at the time, “After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the Webmaster Tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.” That’s the word from Anthony M. Garcia, Senior Product Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft launched Bing Toolbox which includes Bing Webmaster Center Tools, after the new search engine Bing was launched over a month ago.

As webmasters, you can submit your site’s sitemaps to Bing.com, validate your website’s robots.txt and view your web site’s statistics (Crawl issues, backlinks and outbound links) via Bing Webmaster Tools.

You can also monitor multiple sites via your Bing Webmaster Tools account, as long as you verify your site’s ownership by including the authentication code either as an HTML page or within your META tag.

Bing’s Toolbox site also offers you:

• Bing’s whitepaper
• The ability to submit a new website to Bing
• The Bing API and PowerToys related to Bing’s API

Bing’s Webmaster Tools would prove to be more valuable to webmasters if:

• Microsoft can ramp up Bing’s search market share
• New features (geographic targeting and preferred domain) and more reports (e.g. top search queries) can be added to Bing’s Webmaster Tools

Google has been offering similar but more advanced tools to webmasters since 2006. The Google Webmaster Tools have been improved with more newly added features this year.

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.