If you don't yet have a Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) account, just go
ahead and sign up. In the two years since we first published this guide
to BWT, they've added more and more features that can help you manage
your sites.
Just like
Google Webmaster Tools
(GWT), Bing's Webmaster Tools provides some great data for webmasters
to use and address potential SEO issues, and serves as the primary
mechanism for Bing to communicate those issues to site owners. All of
this for the princely sum of free (which is a very fair price IMHO).
For those unfamiliar with Bing Webmaster Tools, this guide will walk
you through the various features available to all webmasters.
Adding a Site
The first step is to log in to
Bing Webmaster Tools,
enter the URL of your home page, and click on the ADD button. This
takes you to a screen to enter a sitemap URL and to enter some basic day
parting information.
Once you've clicked the ADD button you'll be taken to the dashboard
page where you'll see a thumbnail of the home page and a note informing
you that you need to verify the site. To do so, click on the "Verify
Now" text.
Verification
Bing offers multiple verification methods.
XML File Verification
With this option you'll download a file named "BingSiteAuth.xml"
which will automatically have an entry keyed to your account. This file
will need to be placed in the root directory of your site. Once it's
there you click the Verify button at the bottom of the page.
Meta Tag Verification
With this option you'll take the line of code provided and place it
in thesection of the home page of your site. Once it's there you click
the Verify button at the bottom of the page.
DNS Verification
This option is more technical than the previous 2, but if you only
have access to your hosting solution, and don't have the ability to
either modify the head of your home page or to drop files in the root of
your domain, then this is the only option that will work for you.
You'll need to add a CNAME record with the name provided to the value
verify.bing.com. There are instructions on how to do this for the
majority of popular hosting solutions.
Once this has been done, you just have to click the Verify button at the bottom of the page.
Dashboard
Clicking on your site takes you to the dashboard. Here you'll see
data showing trending data over the last month – clicks, impressions,
pages crawled, crawl errors, and pages indexed. You'll also see some
basic information on your sitemaps, top keywords, and top pages linked
to.
Configure My Site
Clicking on this tab will give you a dashboard of data for items that
you can affect when configuring your site. Clicking on the sub-tabs
will give you more detail and allow you to make changes where
applicable.
Sitemaps
Here's where you can submit new sitemaps, and be informed of the success/error status of the sitemap.
Ignore URL Parameters
Here you have the ability to instruct the Bing crawler (Bingbot) to
ignore URL parameters that have no impact upon the content of the page
(usually tracking parameters).
The reason that this option is available was because of the concern
over duplicate content – same content different URLs. By instructing the
crawlers to ignore certain parameters, the idea was that this would
reduce the potential for duplicate content.
If you're using canonical tags you have no need to use this option as
the canonical tags will take care of normalizing your URLs. If you're
not using canonical tags, simply enter the key element of the parameter
to be ignored and click submit (then get a canonical tag project on your
product roadmap so you can ignore this in the future).
Crawl Control
Search engines want to be able to get as much good content from your
site as possible, so they can in turn provide that content to users
within the search results, but they also recognize that they don't want
to harm your business while they do that.
Bing allows you to customize their crawling pattern, so they're
hitting your site the hardest when you have the least amount of traffic
coming to your site. You can accept one of their default options or
click yourself to specify the best times for you to be crawled.
Deep Links
Similar to
sitelinks
in Google, Deep Links give your page more shelf space / visibility in
the search results, by providing additional content options for users to
click through to. These are automatically generated based on the pages
that Bing deem to be the most important / relevant to users.
You don't have the ability to add Deep Links, but by clicking on one
of the URLs you'll be taken to a page that shows the deep links in
order, and gives you the ability to either block one or more of them
(say for example if a completely unrelated or login required section was
displaying), or to provide weighting information for each of the
options in order to reorder them.
Block URLs
If you need to remove either a page or a directory from the Bing
index, here's where you do it. Simply select page or directory, enter
the URL and click on either of the block buttons depending on whether
you're blocking it from just the cache or completely.
Unlike Google, Bing doesn't require that you've removed or redirected
the original content. What they do instead is to block it for 90 days,
and if it's then crawlable and you've not extended the block, they'll
re-index it again.
Page Preview
Here is where you can either block a page preview image within Bing,
or request a page preview refresh. You would do this if you have indexed
content that you need to remove as quickly as possible for legal or
other reasons. Note: it may take up to 24 hours for the page preview
removal / refresh to actually happen.
Disavow Links
Here you can inform Bing of any links that you really don't want. This is the way that Bing is looking at dealing with
negative SEO. Simply select page, directory, or domain and enter the place that houses the link to your site.
Geo-Targeting
This section allows you to set geo-targeting information for your
entire site, subdomain, directory or individual page. Bing will take
this information as a suggestion for how your identified page(s) should
display in the search results. Note, that this will not override
stronger geo signals such as a country specific TLD.
Verify Ownership
This section confirms that your account has been validated to access
information about this domain. Should the validation keys be removed,
then you have the same options here as you had when you originally added
the site (see above).
Connected Pages
If your site has social pages (if it doesn't... why not?) here's
where you can hook them up to your Bing account. Simply enter the
appropriate URLs for your pages here for everything from your Facebook
page down to your MySpace page (yes, that's actually there) and hit the
verify button. Once you've added them you'll start seeing impression and
click data from Bing in the connected pages dashboard, which displays
on this page.
Users
Here you have the ability to add new users without going through the
verification process for each one (although to get here one user has to
be manually verified). Simply add a valid LiveID email address, select
the role you want them to have (Read only, Read/Modify, or
Administrator) and click add. That user will then see this site
displayed in their BWT dashboard.
Reports and Data
This section gives you, as the name suggests, access to reports and
data on the effectiveness of your site on Bing. In most of these
sections you have the ability to export the data and play with it in the
spreadsheet program of your choice.
Page Traffic
Page Traffic shows you the traffic stats for the top performing pages
on a site. You get to see click data, impression data, CTR Data, the
average position when clicked, and the average position when viewed. The
View hyperlink at the end opens up a window that shows you the keywords
for that URL and their data.
Index Explorer
This font of information lets you see all the data about the pages
that Bing has crawled, or attempted to crawl. You can see the number of
URLs discovered, the number of them that have surfaced in search, and
those that have been clicked on in search. You can click down through
the folders and get the data just for that section, which is a valuable
tool for a site that segments content on a folder basis rather than a
subdomain basis.
One really nice feature here is that it shows the subdomains that
have been crawled, so if a dev forgets to put the right robots.txt on
your sandbox site you'll see it listed here.
You can also filter the data to show only pages with 301 redirects,
404 errors or identified malware infections with a single click. If you
want to see pages that have returned other error codes (i.e., 500
series), then all you have to do is select that range from the HTTP code
drop down.
Search Keywords
Here you're going to see some analytics data showing your top
performing keywords in Bing. You'll be able to view the clicks, the
impressions, the CTR, the average position when clicked, and the average
position overall. Clicking on the View hyperlink shows all of the pages
were served up when that keyword was searched on Bing or Yahoo.
SEO Reports
Here you're going to get all of the SEO recommendations that will
help your site comply with SEO best practices. Simply click on the error
to get a full description of the problem along with a list of the top
50 pages that were non-compliant.
Inbound Links
This section shows the external links that Bing has found that point
to your site. The trending information shows whether you're growing or
losing links. Clicking on either the Target Page or on the count of
links for that page brings up a popup window that shows you up to 20k
links (and associated anchor text) for that page.
Crawl Information
This section contains similar data to the Index Explorer section, but
gives a different view into the data. To see the pages that the errors
have been reported for, click on the number under the error type and
they'll be displayed below.
Malware
In the Malware section Bing will inform you of any malware they have
detected on your pages. This also includes any links on your page to
pages that have been identified as ones containing malware.
Diagnostics and Tools
This section currently has seven useful tools that any webmaster can use.
Keyword Research
As is frequently expressed here on SEW,
keyword research
is one of the fundamental tasks of any SEO campaign. Here Bing gives
you access to their keyword research data so you can see the query
volumes on Bing for the keywords you're interested in, along with
related keywords which can give you ideas for other areas that you may
want to target.
Link Explorer
In this section you can enter any URL and get a list of pages that
link to that URL. There are other filter options available, you can
filter by site to get a list of the pages that link to that URL, you can
filter by anchor text so you can see who links with "Click Here" and
who links with the brand name, and you can filter by the source –
internal, external or both (note: internal also includes subdomains).
Fetch as Bingbot
If you'd like to see your page as Bing's crawler – Bingbot – see it,
just enter your URL here and click fetch. You'll then see the headers
and content for the page displayed. Note, unlike the previous tools this
only works on pages that you are verified to view in Bing Webmaster
Tools.
Markup Validator
If you're using structured markup (Microformats, RDFa, Open Graph,
Schema.org, etc), this tool will validate your page to ensure that it
correctly meets the specifications. If it does, then Bing may use that
structured data directly in their search results.
SEO Analyzer
Here you can ask for analysis of an individual page to see what work
would need to be done for the page to comply with SEO best practices.
Verify Bingbot Tool
If you're looking through your log files and come across an IP that
you're not quite sure whether it belongs to Bingbot or not, simply pop
over here, enter the IP address, and you'll get confirmation as to
whether it is or not.
Site Move
If you're ready to move your site to a new domain, or you're moving
content around your site, this is where you tell Bing. Sure they'll pick
up the redirects, and eventually change it in the index, but this can
help to hurry that process along.
Message Center
This is where Bing is going to communicate with you, any issues they
need to inform you of, from malware detection to crawl speed concerns
will be here. If you work with multiple sites you can filter by site,
and if you have lots of messages you can also filter by message type.
Webmaster API
If you'd like to programmatically pull any of the data from Bing
Webmaster Tools into any internal tools, then Bing provides you with an
API to do so. Simply follow the directions in the documentation and use
the API key provided here on this page to do so.
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