14 DAY TRIAL // Not only did Microsoft push adCenter to the next level this week, but the company also upgraded the Bing Webmaster Tools.
And in fact, with the fall 2011 update, the software giant bridged Bing Webmaster Tools and adCenter.
According to Microsoft’s Duane Forrester, webmasters leveraging the Bing tools will now be able to also view data from Microsoft Advertising.
At the same time, there are a number of additional enhancements introduced to Bing Webmasters Tools, designed to enhance the data shared with website owners, boost transparency, usability and efficiency.
One illustrative example in this regard is the expanded Crawl Details information.
“This means we will be showing you all inbound links to a given URL regardless of the heading. So anything listed under the 300, 400 & 500 codes will, by URL, display inbound links to the URL,” Forrester revealed.
“As well, any URLs listed under the Robots.txt and Malware headings will also share data the same way. You are now no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.”
The software giant will also send more span to webmasters, in accordance with the alerts they set up using the search / decision engine tools.
Another enhancements deals with the introduction of URL Normalization suggestions. Website owners will need to opt to enable them, and they’ll also be able to leverage additional improvements such as 50 query string parameters that can be normalized per site.
“Our Index Explorer tool is now being populated with deeper data about your website. As we continue to expand our depth and share, we will continue to update data for domains. Your most visual clue to this change will be in the Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool,” Forrester added.
“With this round of updates, we’re also enabling DNS verification for domains in your account. Past choices included adding a snippet to your <head> code or uploading a dedicated XML file to the root of your site, and both options remain as valid ways to verify your domains. This third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain as well.”