Website Magazine Reports: Bing Improves its Webmaster Tools

Bing apparently is taking a page from the rental car business – when you’re number two, you try harder. Mike Phillips reports in Website magazine that in an effort to keep up with Number One (which would be Google), Bing’s New Webmaster Tools represent an almost complete overhaul of their previous offering. The changes are based on suggestions received from users. Among the requests included more crawling and indexing transparency, more optimization help and more content control.

Writing on his Blog, Bing’s Senior Product Manager Anthony Garcia reported that the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools are more intuitive. They focus on three key concerns: crawl, index and traffic. Garcia said that Bing also added some extra useful features, including Index Explorer and Submit URLs. Index Explorer provides the user with more access than ever before to the Bing index. It is now extremely easy to see where your sites are included in directories and other pages. Submit URLs lets you tell Bing which sites you want it to index.

Additional new features include: Crawl Issues, which details problems when you’re crawling sites; Block URLs, which prevents designated pages from appearing in your Bing SERPS. In all, Garcia says the new changes should drastically improve the transparency and control you need for optimizing your sites for Bing. People already using Bing Webmaster Tools have already been upgraded.