Bing has introduced a major upgrade in its Webmaster Tools, with the focal point of the update being more sharing of data. As Bing says, “Continuing our commitment to help publishers do more on Bing, today we’re announcing our biggest updates since Honey Badger, by focusing on three areas: To share more data, to increase transparency and to bring you more useful tools.”
Bing Webmaster Tools now have the following upgraded features:
The key updates and changes include:
- Expanded Crawl Details: Now webmasters will be able to see all inbound links to a given URL regardless of the heading. This means that anything that comes under the 300, 400 & 500 codes will display inbound links to the URL by each URL. The data will be shared in the same way by URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings. Crawl details have now been expanded and webmasters will not be limited to seeing inbound links pointing to pages that return a 400 header response code.
- Improving Email Alerts: Get informed pronto via email if there is any malware alert placed by Bing on your account. Bing will send an email if they want you to see your crawl rate settings, so that you may increase the crawl rate and give a chance for your content to be crawled faster.
- URL Normalization Suggestions: There are URL normalization tips being offered by Bing, but they will all be disabled by default. Webmasters may customize their elements they need to include for normalization, which is why Bing is also increasing the number of query string parameters per site from 25 items to 50 items. This will be a help to webmasters looking to fix any canonicalization issues at the source.
- Deeper Data In Index Explorer: Now the traffic data will appear within the Index Explorer tool.
- DNS verification: Bing has now made it possible for webmasters to verify their website via DNS for domains in their account.
- adCenter Data Integration: Now the Avg CPC column will show up on the left of the traffic data. Further details will be on the left of the column and you can see the effective keywords faster.
What do you think of these updates? Do share your view. To learn how to use Bing Webmaster Tools, see this. For SEO tips on Bing, see this.
