Delivering on a promise made to Webmasters, Bing released updates to their tools for webmasters today. Internally called “Honey Badger,” the updates to Bing’s webmaster tools adds three new features: crawl delay management, index explorer, and user and role management. Other changes include updates to the toolbox site, including over 40 new educational documents, self-help guides and videos and the ability for webmasters to manage deep links.
Crawl delay management allows webmasters to configure the BingBot crawl rate for a specific domain. For example, if you would prefer Bing to crawl your site during hours where your site is not as used, you can specify that. This tool features a neat, AJAX-based drag-and-drop interface to draw which hours you want to set the BingBot crawl rate.
Index Explorer gives webmasters access to information contained in the Bing index about a particular domain. Previously called Index Tracker, this newly redesigned tool lets gives webmasters transparency about Bing’s data on site performance, freshness, failure detection, extensibility and many other features. This information does not need to be collected by Bingbot. It already exists in Bing’s databases. Webmasters will be allowed access to this data as soon as they sign their domain up.
The user and role management tool lets site owners grants Toolbox access to other users for their domain. Various roles including read-only, read/write or full admin rights can now be offered to multiple users for a particular site. Admins can also restrict (or grant) access to specific folders or subdomains.
The self-help documentation and videos include information on link building, controlling your site in Bing’s index, Canonicalization, redirects and even the new rich snippets implementation at the newly launched partnership site schema.org .
Last March at SES New York, Bing’s Duane Forrester sat down with Webmasters in an open forum asking Webmaster what they wanted to see. There was no presentation, no formal agenda; there was only a notepad and a pen. Bing mst have listened that day as today’s updates are testimony.
In a statement, a Bing spokesperson told SEW, “Today’s redesign offers webmasters a simplified experience that allows them to quickly analyze and identify trends – while also bringing new and unique features to the industry. Our goal is to help webmaster make faster, more informed decisions and drive new insights about their website by presenting them with rich visuals and more organized, relevant content.”
Do you use Bing’s webmaster tools already? Share your thoughts on them or these new changes below.