New Bing Webmaster Tools For SEOs and Webmasters

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New Bing Webmaster Tools For SEOs and Webmasters

engine

5:13 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Bing announces excellent new webmaster tools.

New Bing Webmaster Tools For SEO [bing.com]

This update includes a new, fresh user experience, a range of new tools including Link Explorer (beta) and SEO Analyzer/SEO Reports (beta), and updates to current tools such as our Keyword Research Tool (beta), and our URL Removal Tool, among others.

smallcompany

6:38 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

I wonder if the new Link Explorer would actually be the old Yahoo link tool?
I know many webmasters considered it as the best link exploration tool on the web, right?

scooterdude

8:11 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

i just used it ,the link explorer too man what a rush !

mcneely

8:14 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Wow .. guess I'll give it a go ..

I've been using Bing quite a bit lately so I suppose it couldn't hurt to add the sites I have in Google WMT to Bing ..

lucy24

8:21 pm on Jun 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

:: racing over to make sure they haven't gone and changed the bits I like ::

YAWP!

Sorry. That was weird. On first opening, it looked like such utter chaos, I thought they'd pulled something browser-specific and I had to cross over to Safari to see what it's supposed to look like. And then I reopen in Camino and now it looks fine. Except that, ahem, I really don't like frames, even when-- or especially when?-- they don't have visible borders.

Index count still low. Wonder if they will ever explain?

Search engines may not fully acquire the content on a page if the page is contains a lot of code. Extraneous code can push the content down in the page source making it harder for a search engine crawler to get to. A soft limit of 125 KB is used for guidance to ensure all content & links are available in the page source to be cached by the crawler. This basically means if the page size is too big, a search engine may not be able to get all of the content or may end up not fully caching it.

Ooh. I think that's the first time I've ever seen a concrete number, and I know people have asked. Wonder what "soft limit" means?

They're not kidding about caching, anyway: I asked for details on one of the offending pages (filled with, ahem, content, not those WYSIWYG-style octuple copies of every tag) and it went into perpetual-beachball until I took pity and closed the window.

Use <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ll-cc"> tag in the <head>

What the bleep bleep? Isn't that what the //EN in the DTD is for? They want both now?

Edit after quick detour to logs:

If you ask for the SEO analysis it comes through in logs as yourself (IP and UA) making the request, mixed with some 65.52.110.143 bingbots. BUT the referer is www.bingsandbox.com/webmaster/diagnostics/seo/SeoRenderAnalyzedPage ?url={your page} &id={buncha hexadecimals}. So prepare for a lot of "No Hotlinks" or equivalent if your config/htaccess whitelists referers.

Angonasec

12:51 am on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Perhaps of some use to users on a T1 connection, but for the rest of humanity another appalling example of MS bloated coding.

Note to MS: Most of Asia is still on 56kbps dial-up, and it works well on non-MS sites.

g1smd

1:22 am on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Isn't that what the //EN in the DTD is for?

No it isn't. The EN in the DTD specifies the language used in the HTML tags and attribute names (except they never did get around to having other language versions of html).

Specifying the language used in the page content is done another way; and there are several choices for how to do it: HTTP header, HTTP_EQUIV tag in <head>, language attribute on <html> or other tag, and so on.

dertyfern

1:55 am on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

link explorer rocks! nice going of MS to fill that gap and gain some webmaster/sem attention/top of mind.

ken_b

10:29 pm on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

I signed up for Bing WMT after reading this thread and valdated my site.

But I keep getting a "No data" for all the options.

Is submitting a site map mandatory?

.

Andy Langton

10:44 pm on Jun 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

I've got to say, Bing have clearly put considerable effort into this, and IMO the toolset provided far exceeds that of Google.

Yes, they don't have Google's data, which is going to seriously hamper adoption, and no, these aren't the best SEO tools going. But they've done a great job, and if the average webmaster used these instead of Google Webmaster Tools I reckon they'd have more impact on their site's performance.

@ken_b - sitemaps are definitely not mandatory. There does seem to be a delay after validating though.

Andem

10:21 pm on Jun 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

After using the new Bing Webmaster Tools for a couple of days, I have to agree completely with Andy Langton.

As Angonasec mentioned, it seems very bloated and could do without some of the fancy javascript but in the end, it went from a pretty simple service to something much, much more useful.

I find it interesting that their SEO tools complain about missing <h1> tags.

ken_b

10:32 pm on Jun 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Well I must have done something wrong setting this thing up.

It's been 2 days and they are still show "No data" for everything. But doing a Bing site: search for my domain shows almost all of my pages are apparently indexed.

.

Andy Langton

11:19 pm on Jun 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

I would try their support - always found MS to be pretty responsive to such things.

ken_b

11:27 pm on Jun 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Well I guess 2 days in not unusual.....
From the "help" section...

Bing Webmaster Tools requires up to three days to extract index data for our charts. Other data, such as traffic queries, can take up to a week to appear in the tools. This is because we don�t start collecting that specific site data for the tools until you have successfully registered your site, and once done, we then begin to monitor that data flow.

Andy Langton

12:12 am on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

Just noticed the API too:

[bing.com...]

Looks very handy, and if nothing else a good way to get away from the rather clunky interface ;)

lucy24

1:27 am on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

This is because we don�t start collecting that specific site data for the tools until you have successfully registered your site, and once done, we then begin to monitor that data flow.

Same principle as google's wmt-- or anyone else's. There's a difference between their general activity on your site, like crawling and indexing, and the information they collect for wmt purposes. For example, look for spectacular changes in the keyword list as they work through your pages one by one.

bordering

9:33 pm on Jun 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

OMG it's so clunky. They should have a look at how G does it. Not that a pretty face is everything...

sunnyujjawal

4:40 am on Jun 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

Love it..Nice features as in GWT

ken_b

6:39 pm on Jun 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

Anyone got an idea why Bing WMT would be showing 301 redirects on deleted pages?

I did a header check on a couple of those urls and they return a 404, which is what I'd expect.

lucy24

8:39 pm on Jun 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

This may not apply in your case, but Bing has a solid history of asking for files with the "wrong" form of the domain name-- in my case, without www when I prefer with. So if your www redirects happen at the top level, Bing will rack up piles of 301s before it gets to the intended 404 or 410.

ken_b

3:26 am on Jun 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

Thanks lucy24

lucy24

8:41 am on Jun 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

:: bump ::

I'll be jiggered. Has the "Disavow Links" option under Configure My Site been there all along, or did they sneak it in when nobody was looking?

Andy Langton

9:35 am on Jun 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

They snuck it in when nobody was looking: [bing.com...] ;)

g1smd

2:47 pm on Jun 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

As a site that links out, how to I find out if any of the sites that I link out to have disavowed an incoming link? I'll obviously never want to link to such a site.

So, begins the "negative negative" SEO. Site A isn't doing too well. Competitor sites B and C are doing great and have some fantastic links from site D.

Owner of site A secretly sets up site E and gets some links to it from site D. Owner of site E then disavows those links from site D in the hope that all of the site D outgoing links are discounted thereby harming site B and C in the process.

Robert Charlton

8:47 pm on Jun 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

Anyone know best way to set up multi-user access to a particular site's data? I did a bunch of searching and couldn't find it.

I'm just in the process of "claiming a site as an owner", which makes me nervous because I'm not the owner. The owner may never deal with the tools, but I want to be sure that that option is open.

chrisv1963

6:00 pm on Jul 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

I just checked it. It is crap. A lot of the information in the SEO Reports is wrong. This really is a joke and I don't plan to waste more time on it. I'll check again within a couple of months. If they use this data for the serps, then I can perfectly understand why they are so crappy.

Bewenched

8:46 pm on Jul 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

Last few times I checked their SEO reports for my site it came up empty or threw errors. Hope they get that fixed.

lucy24

12:16 am on Jul 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

A lot of the information in the SEO Reports is wrong.

Unconditionally wrong, or just outdated? Their own boilerplate says they only run it every two weeks. (Could swear it started out at once a month, which is even more exasperating. "I fixed that in June, dammit!")

:: detour to recheck ::

###, they're right. Thought I'd added language tags to everything in that directory. But they really are wrong about optionally putting it on the title tag; that's not where a language belongs. Especially, ahem, if you've got a bilingual title.