I'm sure most here already know all about the
Honey Badger update [bing.com] we rolled out in early June. That update focused on three main areas:
adding help content for Bing Webmaster Tool users (well, for everyone, really).
implmentation of "crawler control" allowing the account holder to set the crawl rate Bingbotfollows over a range, and by hour of the day - so you can set it to crawl slower at peak business times, for example.
user role management - you can now invite others to view data in the account, and set the level of permission they have.
Late last week we managed to get the rest of our June work [bing.com] live as well. The release last week covers a few key areas:
Internationalization- Bing Webmaster Tools data is now available in 34 languages, and all current functionality should now be available in those 34 languages.
Email communications - you can now opt to recieve emails from us for alerts and updates we've made. The emails will go to the address you signed up for the account with, so keep this in mind. This feature exists, but don't panic if you're inbox isn't overflowing yet with emails from us as we're very slowly opening the tap on sending communications.
Improved navigation - we've added navigational elements under each tab (where appropriate) to help you dig deeper, faster, getting to your data more efficiently. Doesn't change what we show, but does make it easier to get to it, we think.
Speed- not really talked about in the blog post, but I'll mention it here. In the past, loading the graphs on the main reports could often take around 4 seconds or so depending on a number of factors. We've got that down to around 500 milliseconds now, again with dependant factors. If you test, you'll almost surely see different numbers than we see, but the point here is the graphs load and update a whole lot faster. :)
Sitemap types - we expanded the sitemap types we can ingest to include the following range: RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, .txt files. Still included are standard .xml files.
Watch for more updates through the summer as we continue to knock off the list of work items we gathered from talking to webmasters at various conferences back in the Spring and last Fall.
As always, the updates to the Bing Webmaster Tools is independant to any updates made on the Core Search side - short form: updating our tools does not affect rankings in any way.
...and I'll see some of you at Pubcon this Fall, I'm sure... :)
duane
