Microsoft has just launched a newly updated Bing Webmaster Tools which according to the Bing Community Blog is a huge improvement to the old Microsoft Webmaster Tools. The update was being carried out after Bing has reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities who are in unison in wanting to have more transparency on how Bing crawls and indexes websites, more control of their website contents in the Bing index as well as more useful information for site optimization on Bing.
The “retooled” Bing Webmaster Tools now gives you a simplified and more intuitive experience on crawl, index and traffic. Some of its key features include:
- Index Explorer – provides access to browse through Bing index to check which of your site’s directories and pages have been included in Bing’s search index
- Submit URLs – provides Bing with signal on which URLs it should include in the index
- Crawl issues – lets you view details on redirects, malware and exclusions
- Block URLs – prevents specific URLS from appearing in Bing SERPs.
The new Bing Webmaster Tools also uses Microsoft Silverlight enabling it to deliver rich charting functionality which is useful for analyzing up to six months of crawling, indexing and traffic data Bing has for your websites.
For existing Bing Webmster Tools users, their old account can be used for logging in to the new Bing Webmaster Tools.
So, are you still using Bing Webmaster Tools? What can you say about the new design and functionality of the tools?
