Using Bing Webmaster Center Tools

Let’s face it, regardless of whether it is negative or positive, truth is that Bing’s new Decision Engine has been in the buzz lately. Coupled with the fact that Microsoft plans to spend 100 million in campaigns to promote it, it is likely that we will continue to hear about Bing more often.

SEO VS DEO (Decision Engine optimization)

If you have been reading some of my SEO related articles, you will notice that almost all are tailored for using Google’s Webmasters Tools. A guest post from Nicolas Prudhon of SEO Help, is probably the only post you will find here that is related to MSN SEO, now Bing. Until today. While it is true that Google is still the dominant force on search, the idea of what other engines think about our site is equally important. You know, Every Bit Counts:) Since Bing pitches itself as a Decision Engine rather than a Search Engine, I came up with this new (I think) concept of naming it DEO – Decision Engine Optimization🙂

What does Bing Webmaster Tools offer?

Bing offers a set of tools that help you get the best results for your website. These tools were designed to address the questions that webmasters have said are most important. The Bing Webmaster Center tools make it easy for you to ensure that your website is being crawled and indexed by Bing, and identify any issues Bing encountered while crawling your website. Bing can help you manage your sitemaps, identify which websites link to yours, and tell you if your Robots.txt file is configured correctly to work with the Bing web crawler. The web crawler used by Bing is also known as MSNBot. MSNBot is a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links.

To get started, you need to make sure Webmaster Center knows which websites you own. You need to register the websites you manage with Webmaster Center, and then set them up to be authenticated by Webmaster Center before the tools can be used. You can use your current LiveId to access the site or create an account if you still don’t have any. Login, add a site and then authenticate it following their instructions.

What information does Bing Webmaster Center provide?

1. The last time your site was crawled by MSNbot.
2. Domain Score.
3. Number of pages indexed by Bing.
4. Is your Domain blocked or not.
5. Page Score for each of your 5 best performing pages.
6. Last date each page was crawled and if it is blocked or not.

Domain Score and Page Score

Provides a measurement of how authoritative Bing views your domain to be, with five green boxes being the highest rating and five empty boxes being the lowest. This is based on many of the same factors Bing uses to determine static rank (A query-independent ranking of a webpage by a search engine. The static rank of a webpage provides a general indicator to the overall quality of the webpage.) , but isn’t directly comparable. So if you can see a lot of green boxes filled, this means that your website is in pretty good shape.

What else?

Crawl Issues Tool: The Crawl Issues tool enables you to see issues Bing has identified while crawling and indexing your website. Here you will be able to see problems such as, file not found (404), blocked content, malware infections, etc.

Backlink Tool: The Backlinks tool gives you access to the list of URLs that link to your website. These links are also called inbound links. Often these links are from webpages that links to your products or organization. Identifying such webpages can be valuable as a means of identifying sources of promotion, feedback, or both for your website. You can also see the power of those links by looking at the green boxes:)

Outbound Links Tool: The Outbound Links tool provides you with a list of URLs leading to other websites that Bing found on your website. You can also check whether any of your links point to an infected site or you can filter your results to target specific parts of your website.

Keywords Tool: Use the Keywords tool to see how your website performs against searches for a specific keyword or key phrase. This tool is useful for understanding how users (who often choose websites based on keywords searches) might find your website.

And many more. There you have it, these tools exists, it’s free and I see no reason why you should not use it. Have you tried using Bing Webmaster Center Tools yet?