Bing has launched some enhancements to Bing Webmaster Tools in an update called “Honey Badger”.
“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,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “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.”
Enhancements include:
- Crawl delay management: Lets webmasters configure the bingbot crawl rate for a specific domain.
- Index Explorer: Allows webmasters to the ability to access data in the Bing index regarding a specified domain.
- User and Role Management: Provides site owners with the ability to grant admin, read/write or read-only access to other users for their site.
Crawl deal is configurable by hour. Users can ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours or have it crawl faster during off-peak hours. There is drag-and-drop functionality that lets users create a crawl graph by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer across the graph. Individual columns can also be clicked for fine-tuning.
Index Explorer, Bing says, is a “complete rewrite” of the Index Tracker backend, focusing on freshness, performance, extensibility, reduced machine footprint, and stability and failure detection. New sites will have this data as they sign up.
The company also launched the ability for webmasters to manage deep-links and added over 40 new educational documents and videos to the Toolbox site. The content covers things like: using Webmaster Tools, data explanation, link building, removing/blocking pages from Bing’s index, SEO guidance, managing URL parameters, rich snippets (schema.org), canonicalization, nofollow, managing redirects, 404 page management, etc.
Bing says you can “count on more monthly content being added” to Webmaster Tools in the near future.