Blog Post: Updates to Bing Webmaster Tools, data and content.

Bing has been investing in building its Webmaster Tools for a while now, and today we’re announcing some of the most recent updates. We spent a lot of time earlier this year meeting with people at search conferences to understand what new features they wanted to see from us, and what current features we could support further. We also gathered feedback on what helpful content should exist within our webmaster space. Through the Honey Badger update, as we’re calling it, you’ll see noticeable investments in both areas as we launch a revised webmaster experience here at Bing. In fact, you can count on more monthly content being added in the near future as we work through a list of topics we’ll be covering. Below you will see some of the investments on the feature side and on the content side.

Here is a walk-through of some of the major features and improvements Bing Webmaster account users will see:

• Crawl delay configurable by the hour
  • Users can ask us to crawl slower during peak business hours and have us crawl faster during off-peak hours
  • 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
• New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they 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)

Beyond the updated and enhanced features, Bing Webmaster Tools is also launching detailed self-help guides and how-to documents. We’re covering a wide range of topics in this initial release, from how to accomplish tasks within Bing Webmaster tools, to what you should be focused on when performing search engine optimization. Here’s a quick peek at some of the list of new content topics we’re covering:

•  Using Bing Webmaster Tools
• Webmaster Tools Data explained
• How to perform Link Building
• Removing or blocking pages from our index
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidance
• Managing URL parameters
• Implementing Rich Snippets (www.schema.org)
• Managing Canonicalization (duplicate content)
• Using the <rel="nofollow"> tag
• Managing redirects
• 404 page management
• Rich Media and Search

This is a snapshot of the over 40 new guides and how-to documents we’re launching. Watch for new content to appear monthly as we invest further in explaining features and highlight areas of work webmasters are focused on.

Visit Bing Webmaster Tools to see the new features in your account, and to access the new content.

- Duane Forrester, Bing

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