14 DAY TRIAL // The webmaster tools offered by Microsoft for its search / decision engine have been upgraded this week, better equipping site owners with resources to have their websites play nice with Bing. Microsoft is referring to the new features and content introduced to the Bing Webmaster Tools as the Honey Badger update, with Duane Forrester, from the Bing team, stressing that the evolution of the tools is by no means random.
In fact, the software giant has been keeping its ear to the search street, so to speak. The Honey Badger refresh is in this regard, a direct result of the feedback that Microsoft harvested from webmasters on both existing and new features important to them, as well as on how to expand the support content set up to streamline the usage of said features.
With the Honey Badger update already rolled out, site owners can start leveraging the new features and improvements Bing Webmaster Tools immediately. Forrester highlighted some of the new additions:
“
Crawl delay configurable by the hour
- Simple drag-and-drop functionality allows you to create a crawl graph by clicking and dragging your mouse pointer across the graph. You can easily fine tune by clicking individual columns, too.
- Feature enables dedicated pre-set crawl settings for AJAX websites.
Index Explorer
- This is a complete rewrite of the Index Tracker backend focusing on the following tenants: freshness, performance, extensibility, reduced machine footprint, stability and failure detection, index explorer data for new sites at sign up.
User and role management
- Site owners can now grant admin, read / write, or read-only access to other users for their site using their existing verification code
- They can also grant users access to parts of their sites (subdomains or folders).”
As is the case with a variety of Microsoft tools, the Redmond company is not only providing Bing Webmaster upgrades, but also a collection of new guides and how-to resources. In total, webmasters will be able to find over 40 new documents via their Bing Webmaster accounts.