Archive for the ‘Tools’ Topic

Today, we are announcing the release of new features for the Bing Webmaster tools. These features are a direct response to feedback we’ve received since our launch last month which was announced in Anthony’s “A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools” blog post.

The loudest feedback was, “I want to download my data!” . . . so, we’ve added a new data export capability which enables you to export and download data from Bing Webmaster Tools about your registered sites. You can export up to six months of data in the form of a downloadable, comma-delimited CSV file. The following data downloads are available by selecting the ‘Export’ button in the UI:

The second area we received consistent feedback on is allowing more control of how Bing crawls your sites. We’ve added a “Crawl Settings” page, and the first setting made available is “Add Query String Parameters.” As you likely know, query string parameters in URLs can result in multiple variations of a URL all pointing to the same content. Site owners can now add query string parameters that can be ignored when indexing their sites, thus gaining multiple advantages: it prevents duplicate content in the Bing index, it avoids having a page’s index value split between multiple URL variations, and avoids unnecessary site bandwidth usage by the search crawler.

We have many additional features planned for the coming months . . . but we are listening closely to, and adjusting our plans based on your input and feedback. Continue to express yourself by sending us feedback, suggestions, and questions either through blog comments or the Bing Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum.

– Steve Tullis, Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing Webmaster Tools

In my last post, I started digging in to the many great new features offered in the new Bing Webmaster Tools. We have so much to talk about that I needed two posts to cover it! Let’s get right back in the saddle and ride this horse back home.

Note: As in the Tips and Tricks Part 1 post, the features I discuss here are primarily based on the Silverlight version of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. While there is a basic, down level version of the tools available, the Silverlight version offers greatly enhanced functionality and is the recommended way to get the full effect the tool’s rich index data offerings and advanced features for your website.

Add more of your URLs to the index

Have you just published important, new content pages to your site that you want to quickly bring to the attention of the Bing crawler? Bing Webmaster Tools now enables you to address that. From the Index tab, go to the Submit URLs tool and begin adding those URLs. Add each full URL on its own line, separated by pressing ENTER. Click Continue when you are done adding URLs so you can confirm the proposed URLs. If everything looks good, click Submit. Otherwise, if one or more of the URLs are not correct, click Cancel and redo your submissions. Note that you can even submit URLs already in the index (we’ll recrawl them)-this is the same function as Recrawl URL in Index Explorer.

Please note that Bing will evaluate all URLs submitted for indexing. If we discover the use of web spam techniques or malware infections, those submissions will be rejected.

As with the Recrawl URLs feature mentioned in the Part 1 post, the Submit URLs feature is not limitless. Bing does set quota limits on the number of URLs that can be added and/or recrawled (both apply to the same quota). You can submit up to 10 URLs per day and up to 50 per month. The quotas are in effect for entire domains. Multiple webmaster accounts for the same domain cannot combine their quotas to get more URL submissions. Bing also disallows submitting redirected pages to a site already at full quota.

Also, note that the daily quota limit resets after midnight GMT, at which point you can resume adding more URLs (provided you have enough monthly quota left).

Got errors?

When we crawl a site, we see everything about it, warts and all. Wouldn’t you like to know when we detect errors or problems? We thought so. Check out the Crawl Details tool on the Crawl tab. Crawl Details is a customized version of Index Explorer, dedicated to quickly showing you the problems we encountered when crawling your site. At a glance, you’ll see if we encountered any issues such as the following:

• Missing pages or broken URLs
• Server errors
• Server redirects (including specific instances of 302s, which are often mistakenly used when 301s are more appropriate)
• Malware infections
• Pages excluded by robots.txt

You see how many pages are affected by each issue, and can then click the error name to see a list of all affected pages. This is also a great benefit for the site owner, because s/he can resolve or fix issues that are preventing content from being properly indexed.

Sitemap submissions

Did you just update your XML-based Sitemap file? Assuming you’ve already submitted your Sitemap file to Bing, resubmit the updated file using the Add Sitemap feature of the Sitemaps tool on the Crawl tab to bring it to our attention. We support multiple Sitemap files per site, and for very large sites that require multiple Sitemaps just to list all of their valuable content, we also support Sitemap index files as well.

If you haven’t yet submitted a Sitemap file to Bing, consider doing so. Sitemaps are great tools for webmasters to highlight the most important content on their site to search engines. Help us find your best content with a Sitemap! To do so, log in to the tools, click a registered site in the Home tool, click the Crawl tab, click Sitemaps in the left nav pane, click Add Sitemap, enter the Sitemap URL, and then click Submit.

See your top queries in live action

Do you wonder how searchers are finding your site in the Bing SERPs? We can tell you. Go to the Traffic tab and see the Queries table, where you’ll find the top queries driving traffic to your site. Click on any of those queries to go to new Bing SERP so you can see where your link currently ranks for that query.

What if I don’t want to use Silverlight?

There will be folks who, for whatever reason, either technically cannot or personally do not want to install Silverlight, the technology platform on which our new tools are built. Is this a deal-breaker? Not necessarily. Bing has offered a basic, down-level web experience for those users. Let me tell you what you CAN do with the basic version of the tools:

• Register a site, for which Bing will retain at least the default page in the index.
• Submit URLs to Bing (within quota limits)
• Add Sitemap files to your site for more efficient and targeted crawling

OK, so this is good. But what will you miss out on? Aside from the plethora of site data reports covering clicks, impressions, pages indexed, pages crawled, and top index queries, there’s access to webmaster messages, advanced tool functionality, and more. Here’s the list:

• Chart data and up to six months of historical trend information
• Count of total URLs in index (available by directory)
• Block URLs feature (and block reversals)
• Index Explorer’s detailed filtering capabilities to see details of how your site was indexed
• Crawl error reports
• Malware infection reports
• URLs blocked by your robots.txt file
• Last crawled date and HTTP code for each indexed page
• Sitemap validation status
• Much more

Dig in!

The best way to find out what’s in the new tools is simply to sign in, register a site, and dig in. Rest assured that this iteration of the Bing Webmaster Tools is not an endpoint, but instead is just the beginning of a deeper commitment to webmasters and SEOs by Bing. We have a lot of exciting things scheduled for 2010, so stick with us, use our tools, read the blog, participate in the forums, and provide us with your feedback to help us make our Webmaster Center offerings even better yet.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about the tools, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum. Later…

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center

I trust by now everyone has heard the big news: the new Bing Webmaster Tools are here! I have been working with it for quite some time now. I like the new look and feel of the Silverlight-based user interface. It is clean, intuitive, and easy to use.

As the primary contributor to the tool’s documentation, I’ve had some interesting discoveries as the tools were developed, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some interesting features and share some cool tips and tricks that I’ve learned. If you are already a registered user, sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and follow along. If you haven’t signed up yet, what’s holding you back?

Note: The features I discuss here are based on the Silverlight version of the Bing Webmaster Tools. While there is a basic, down level version of the tools available, the Silverlight version offers greatly enhanced functionality and is the recommended way to get the full effect of the tool’s rich index data offerings and advanced features for your website.

Site registration

Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to register sites based on the specific site branch you manage.. If you own the site’s domain, then register the site at the root. But if you work for a very large website and manage only a subsection of the site, you can register just that subdomain or subdirectory. This feature enables enterprise site managers to delegate site management responsibilities through the tools to specific people or teams, ensuring that any changes made in crawler settings only affect the portion of the site they manage. To make this work, just place the Bing-provided ownership verification code at the registered location (the registered root) and you’ll be good to go!

A great benefit of registering a site with Bing Webmaster Tools is that we guarantee the default page of any site you register will be added to the index and will always remain in the index. That alone is reason enough for many smaller sites to sign up!

Note: For sites that are newly registered with Bing Webmaster Tools, there may not be any data available in the charts immediately after registration. The tools’ servers need to extract the initial data from the index servers and begin the data collection effort for your site. If you initially see a “Not available” message in some data fields, rest assured that you’ll start seeing data there within approximately 72 hours. If after that time you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to post a question with details of your situation to the Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum. A member of the Webmaster Center team will look into the matter for you.

Verification code

To use the Bing Webmaster Tools, you need to verify you own the registered website by adding a Bing-provided ownership verification code. Bing provides this when you go through the Add Site process. If you choose to use the downloadable XML file method, just click Option 1 in the Verify Ownership dialog box and click BingSiteAuth.xml in Step 1 to download the file from Bing, but then leave that dialog box open. Once downloaded, simply upload that XML file to the registered root of your site (please see the previous tip for what is meant by registered root!). Once the upload is done, go back to the open Verify Ownership dialog box so you can test to see if Bing sees your newly uploaded verification file. Click the link to the expected location of your uploaded verification file listed in Step 3 of Option 1 in the Verify Ownership dialog box. If you see the XML file appear in your browser, you’re golden.

Veteran users of our webmaster tools should note that sites previously registered with Bing Webmaster Center using their original verification codes, placed in either a <meta> tag on the default page or stored in the LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml file, are still supported, so no change is required to use the new tools today. However, the new tool does issue new verification codes for newly added sites, and the XML-based ownership verification file has been renamed to BingSiteAuth.xml. The new <meta> tag code or verification file must be used for all new sites, even with existing accounts.

To keep things working smoothly, do not swap the verification codes between the old and new XML files or <meta> tags. If you must update all of your registered sites with the new verification code, you can force your old sites to use the new code by removing them and re-adding them on the Home page. Just remember, existing sites should use the codes they were previously assigned, and newly added sites should use the new code. The new code will be consistent for all new sites you add to your account going forward.

Working with charts

Silverlight enables us to bring you several new charts of useful information. But these charts aren’t just static images. You can interact with them as well. The charts in the Crawl Summary, Index Summary, and Traffic tools all offer x-axis slider controls so you can adjust the data’s amount of time and the portion of the timeline shown. Clicking and dragging the chart’s sliders allows you to zoom in or out to the granularity you want to see. As Bing collects more data over time for registered sites, individual sites will have access to up to six months of historical data.

And while you’re at it, note that as you pause your mouse pointer over the data lines in any of the charts (including those in the Dashboard tool), individual points in time are shown and the related data details are revealed in the chart’s upper left corner.

Select items in a list

Several of the tools contain lists that you can add items to or remove items from, including registered sites in the Home tool, submitted Sitemaps in the Sitemaps tool, and URL blocks in the Block URLs tool. To remove an item from these lists, just pause your mouse pointer over the line in the list you want to delete to reveal a check box in the left side of the line. The check boxes enable you to perform actions on multiple items at the same time. Select the check boxes of the list items to delete and then click the tool’s version of a Remove button.

Dig into Index Explorer

The Index Explorer tool on the Index tab is one of the key components of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. Let’s check out some of the cool things you may not realize you can do to your indexed URLs with this tool:

• Copy them. Index Explorer enables you to examine just the portion of your site’s indexed content you want to see by changing the base URL in the Directory box. But instead of manually typing out a potentially long URL, copy and paste it! Select the URL you want copied, and then right-click it to reveal the Copy URL option. For keyboard fans, you can also use the tried-and-true CTRL+C. Once copied, paste the copied URL in the Directory box with CTRL+V.
• Recrawl them. If you just updated an indexed page and want it recrawled ASAP, find the page in Index Explorer, and then click it to display the Page Details dialog box. Click Recrawl URL to request an expedited recrawl of the page to update the index.

  Note: While this feature is really cool, it’s not limitless. Bing does set quota limits on the number of URLs that can be submitted. You can submit up to 10 URLs per day and up to 50 per month. The quotas are in effect for entire domains. Multiple webmaster accounts for the same domain cannot combine their quotas to get more URL submissions. Bing also disallows submitting redirected pages to a site already at full quota.

• Block them. Do you have indexed content you want to stop from showing up in the Bing search engine results pages (SERPs)? Set up a block. To do so, find the content in Index Explorer and then click it. In the resulting dialog box, you can either block the content from showing up in the search cache (click Block cache to block the appearance of the Cached Page link) or block all references to the content (click Block URL and Cache to block both the Cached page link and the URL’s blue link) from appearing in the Bing SERPs. You can set up blocks for individual pages, directories, or even the entire site. (You can later reverse a blocked URL as well, but you’ll need to go to the Block URLs tool in the Index tab to do that).
• Filter them. One of the coolest things you can do with Index Explorer is apply one or more filters simultaneously to narrow down the list of indexed content to just those matching specific index data conditions, such as HTTP codes received, crawl dates, and much, much more. That said, while you can look up crawler-detected problems in Index Explorer, it’s even easier to do with the Crawl Details tool on the Crawl tab.
• Date them. Want to see when a specific page in the index was last crawled, what its HTTP code was, or how big the file is? Find the page in Index Explorer and then click it to display the Page Details dialog box.

By the way, if your filtered search results in a “No data available” message, clear away one or more of the filters and click Apply filters again. Double-check what’s listed in the Directory box as well, as you may not be searching from the registered root (fix that quickly by clicking Reset filters).

I’m just getting started here. I’ll have more cool tips and hot tricks for the new Bing Webmaster Tools next time around. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum. Stay tuned!

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center

Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing.

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.

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. 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.

We have good news for all the veteran users of the Bing Webmaster Tools. Your existing Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools. 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.

This is only the beginning; we have many more features planned for release in the coming months. These are your tools, so send us your feedback, suggestions, and questions to help guide how the tools evolve. As always, you are encouraged to comment here in the blog or post your feedback and questions to the Bing Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum.

– Anthony M Garcia, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools

The wait is over (almost!). After gathering much appreciated feedback from our valued customers over the past year, the Bing Webmaster team held a session today at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle where we showed a preview of the next version of Bing Webmaster Tools, our no-cost toolset for webmasters and search engine optimizers (SEOs). Bing Webmaster Tools were rebuilt from the ground up to offer more data, including a new user interface and enhanced charting functionality.

If you weren’t at SMX Advanced today, no worries. You’ll get your own opportunity to see the new tools in action yourself in the very near future.

What has changed?

Actually, a better question is “what didn’t change?” In short, we wiped the slate clean and started over. We prioritized key features webmasters wanted most. You spoke, and we listened.

Silverlight enhanced

The new Bing Webmaster Tools remain web-based, and basic functionality is available through most web browsers. But to achieve the full potential of the new Bing Webmaster Tools user experience, you’ll want to install Microsoft Silverlight 4.0. Silverlight is a browser plug-in (approximately 5 MB in size, installs in less than 10 seconds) that helps organizations design, develop, and deliver rich applications and experiences on the Web. Silverlight works across multiple browsers, platforms, and devices, including the Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

Silverlight enabled our development team to provide a smooth, visual experience, enabling webmasters to better analyze important trends through connected visual data about their websites.

Tool features

The Bing Webmaster team chose to focus on three key areas of interest to webmasters: Crawl, Index, and Traffic. Each area will offer detailed data going back as far as six months with dynamic charting capabilities, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them.

A key, new feature to Bing Webmaster Tools is Index Explorer, a tree-view that enables webmasters to see at a glance all of the crawling and index data for their website. Each level in the tree view offers webmasters access to specific data management controls, such as URL blocking, cache blocking, and recrawl requests.

Bing Webmaster Tools has added a feature to Submit URLs that allows webmasters to send Bing a list of URLs that should be prioritized. URLs submitted through this tool will be recrawled or crawled and added to the index if not already included (as long as they are not employing malware or web spam techniques).

The Bing Webmaster Tools not only give webmasters control of what content to add to the Bing index, but the new Block URLs tool gives webmasters control over what content to block from the SERPs. Webmasters can choose to block cache links, block URLs to individual pages or whole containers of pages, or to even block their entire website from appearing in SERPs. The tool records a history of submitted blocks, and webmasters can easily reverse a block at any time.

Today’s demo

Eric and Sasi gave a live demo today of Index Explorer, showing not only how webmasters will be able to use the tool’s tree view control to see detailed data about their websites as gathered by the Bing crawler, but how they can also control the index data through blocks and recrawl requests.

For those of you couldn’t join us in person for the preview, keep your eye on the Webmaster Center blog. There will be more information coming soon on the new Bing Webmaster Tools, including the official release announcement and details about using the tools to learn more about your website from the Bing search engine perspective.

More to come

We are really excited to finally be able to talk about this project! But ultimately, it’s not about us. The new Bing Webmaster Tools are about you: helping you be more successful in search with more transparent tools that offer simplified, visual control; offering you more data over a longer period of time (six months!) to allow you to make better decisions; and providing a more intuitive and powerful user interface to help you get the most from the tools. And this is only the first step. Bing is committed to enhancing the tools on a regular basis to respond to webmaster needs. We will publish regular Webmaster Center blog posts to alert you to new releases and features, and answer your questions about the tools in the Webmaster Center forums. We look forward to having you join us — it’s going to be fun!

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Webmaster Tools & Feature Requests forum. Later…

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center