14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has hit the reset button when it comes down to the webmaster tools associated with its search/decision engine. Anthony M Garcia, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools, announced that an updated to the Bing Webmaster Tools has been introduced today, July 21st, 2010. However, this is no ordinary refresh, at least not judging by the size of the effort invested into revamping the resources available to webmasters.
“So what’s new in the updated Bing Webmaster Tools? Everything. With your feedback in mind, the Bing Webmaster Team decided to hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up,” Garcia stated.
According to the Redmond company, work on the evolution of the Bing Webmaster Tools debuted soon after the introduction of Bing. At that time, the software giant taped webmaster and SEO communities for feedback on how the tools could be improved. According to Garcia, it was input from webmasters and those involved in search engine optimization that helped move the Bing Webmaster Tools forward. Microsoft focused on boosting the transparency of how the Bing crawler deals with websites and the indexing process. In addition, the changes are designed to offer more control over how Bing indexes content, and extra information to allow for better SEO.
“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,” Garcia added.
“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,” he said.
According to Microsoft, existing users of the Bing Webmaster Tools will not to have to do anything in order to enjoy the new version of the tools. The Redmond company made it clear that all olds Webmaster Center accounts will be automatically upgraded. “This means that starting today, you’re already a registered user of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s no need to create a new account, change ownership verification codes, or re-enter site data. If you don’t have a current account, you can easily sign-up and register your sites to begin using the new tools,” Garcia said.
Still, the software giant indicated that the recent overhaul of the Bing Webmaster Tools is just a preview of things to come. Garcia promises that over the course of the next few months, additional new features will be unveiled to the Bing Webmaster Tools.
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