While a lot of attention is paid to Google and their Search Console service for webmasters, Bing still deserves a look in – after all Bing powers Yahoo search results as well as a lot of other smaller search engines so it’s 2 for 1 on the big names when it comes to managing your site’s ranking on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Microsoft’s Bing team announced Tuesday at SMX London that Bing Webmaster Tools’ Submit URL, Block URL, and Crawl Control features have been migrated to the new Bing Webmaster portal. Users will be able to use the current and new pages simultaneously for a brief period before Bing deprecates the current pages in a few weeks.
Bing’s new toolset is designed to provide a cleaner, faster, more responsive experience for webmasters and SEOs. The newly migrated tools are useful for controlling how Bing crawls and indexes content. These improvements may encourage more usage and increase adoption.
What are these tools…
- URL Submission – The most popular tool in Bing Webmaster, Submit URL, is now updated. Using this tool, users can submit URLs to Bing for real-time indexation.
- Block URL – This tool can be used to temporarily prevent any URL from appearing in the search results. This feature can also be used to clear Bing’s cache for a URL in case you have updated the page.
- Crawl Control – This tool can be used to control the speed of crawling of your site by Bingbot. It lets you set the hourly crawl rate using a template or through a custom setup based on your site’s traffic pattern.