Bing has just launched a completely revamped version of their Webmaster Tools for our SEO and webmaster enjoyment and it looks OK, if not quite perfect. Bing’s Eric Gilmore spoke at SMX Advanced earlier this summer about having hit the reset button and started with a blank sheet of paper and really having listened to their forums; building a modern and more simplified architecture. But a quick glance at the various comments on Bing’s community sites shows that they have missed out or lost a few key features. Although to be fair Eric did say that this was just the beginning and their agile team will be picking up on comments and working towards meeting the needs of its discerning users as time progresses. The most important thing was for them to make the whole Bing thing more transparent.
So What’s New?
Well for starters, the main things you can track using Bing Webmaster tools are:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Pages crawled
- Pages index and explorer
- Crawl Errors
- URL Blocks and Submissions
Anthony M Garcia, Senior Product Manager for Bing Webmaster Tools explains:
“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.”
The most unsurprising thing to find was that Bing Webmaster tools basically looks a lot more like Google Webmaster tools. A full comparison to Google will come later, which will hopefully give Bing a chance to iron out some of the obvious creases.
Silver Light
One of the most annoying things is that you are forced to install Microsoft Silver Light if you want to see any of the data. The previous version had none of this inconvenience and I am surprised that Bing has insisted on this option as it will no doubt cause many to be put off. While it is annoying to have to download it, to be fair once it is up and running the graphics are nice and smooth.
Dashboard
The dashboard is nice. The quick glance stats is quite helpful and the graphical displays provide a nice Google-like experience.
Last Index Date
This is a particularly cool feature which lets you requests a re-crawl quickly. Another annoying thing is the fact that you can’t seem to download any of the data and are confined to viewing it on screen only. This makes any useful data that little bit less useful.
No Backlinks Listing
The strangest omission is certainly the backlinks listing. Why such a simple thing would be missed out of Bing’s new, supposedly modelled on what users want, webmaster tool box? We can only think that this is to be rectified in the near future as without it Bing is streets behind Google…still.
Also now missing:
- Language and region information
- Domain Score
- Robots.txt validator
- Outbound Links Report
If it were not for the fact that Bing will soon be powering Yahoo search, Bing could well have been swept into the gutter by Google, who provides much the same if not superior webmaster tools already, plus they don’t require a Silver Light download! The new Bing Webmaster Tools do provide a lot of useful information which may over time prove to be more useful than that which it offered before.
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