Bing revamps Site Explorer in new Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft Bing has announced[1] the re-launch of Bing Site Explorer[2]. Don’t be fooled, Bing Site Explorer is a complete revamp from the old version. Bing did not simply migrate the feature from the old version of Bing Webmaster Tools to the new version of Bing Webmaster Tools[3].
Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us, “This is a complete new experience, cleaner and far easier to use and complete new system to support this tool.”
“We now deliver a lighting fast experience, including on super large sites, and more actionable experience helping SEOs investigate quickly their sites,” he added.
What the new Site Explorer looks like. Here is a screen shot of the new tool:
What Site Explorer shows you. Bing Site Explorer shows you how Microsoft Bing sees your site. It will show you how most URLs Bing has seen on the web while indexing. This includes redirects, broken links, URLs blocked by robots.txt.
Bing organizes all this information “in a file explorer-like fashion,” Microsoft said. This lets you break down your view in a navigation folder like interface, so you can understand and debug your site based on your site’s own internal structure.
You are able to see clicks, impressions, backlink counts and more. You can also request indexing within the tool and test any URL with its robots.txt tester tool.
- Indexed – Number of URLs which have been successfully indexed inside that folder.
- Error – Critical crawl errors which have led to not indexing of URLs.
- Warning – These may include URLs with guidelines issues, temporary crawl issues or robots.txt disallowed, etc. Webmasters should periodically check for an increase/decrease in these numbers.
- Excluded – URLs with spam violations, low rank etc.
Why we care. SEOs and webmasters should care how search engines crawl, index and categorize their web sites. This tool gives SEOs information on how Microsoft Bing does just that and then gives you more data on clicks, impressions, links, errors, warnings, indexing issues and much more.
It is worth exploring this revamped Bing Site Explorer tool. You can access it at bing.com/webmasters/siteexplorer[4].
Related: The[5] Essential Guide to SEO: Master the science of SEO[6]
About The Author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick[7], a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable[8], a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry[9] and he can be followed on Twitter here.
References
- ^ announced (blogs.bing.com)
- ^ Bing Site Explorer (www.bing.com)
- ^ new version of Bing Webmaster Tools (searchengineland.com)
- ^ bing.com/webmasters/siteexplorer (www.bing.com)
- ^ The (searchengineland.com)
- ^ Essential Guide to SEO: Master the science of SEO (searchengineland.com)
- ^ RustyBrick (www.rustybrick.com)
- ^ Search Engine Roundtable (www.seroundtable.com)
- ^ Cartoon Barry (www.barryschwartz.org)
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