Currently in Munich SMX Munich is taking place. Johanna Langer is there for us covering the talks. In this post she summarises the talk by Stephan Walcher looking at the different Bing Webmaster Tools functions.
Bing Webmaster Tools Functions
Stephan Walcher, Head of SEO Consulting at the agency Catbird Seat GmbH in Munich, gave a very enthusiastic and motivating presentation on the Bing Webmaster Tools. After the lecture, many people raised their hand in the audience when he asked: “How many of you are going to try the Bing Webmaster Tools now?”
The Webmaster Tools as an important communication tool between webmasters and the search engine.
To authenticate BWMT Stefan recommends to use the XML method, since it is the easiest way to do this (especially for large sites).
As an alert system the Webmaster Tools are very important: Larger changes should be looked up immediately. (eg more / less traffic, indexed pages, etc.) => Define processes, how and who can respond promptly.
The Bing Webmaster Tools Functions
Sitemap: A sitemap is important, but Bing is very strict => 99% of the Sitemap must match or deliver a status code 200. Therefore: If you have a sitemap, it should be correct, or crawler resources are wasted and Bing gets “angry.”
Parameter: The care of parameters in the tools is only suboptimal => these problems should be solved at the technical level. Temporarily, until a good technical solution is found the parameter handling is useful.
Block urls: In Bing WMT you can also block URLs, which is something like a noindex. It is really fast => the urls are quickly removed from the Bing index and cache.
Links reject: Similar to Google’s Disawow tool links may be rejected. With Bing, there are no such Penalties as they are with Google. But if it becomes too much, the site will be completely thrown out of the index.
Geo-targeting: In the Bing WMT geotargeting is possible and it can be determined where the domain is to be shown.
Connected Sites: Here social media profiles can be entered, so you can see their rankings and more data about them in the BWMT.
Reports: In the Reporting and data tab beautiful diagrams can be found. SEO Report: What mistakes do I have on the page? Severity is indicated for prioritization
Malware: If this message is shown, then you have a significant problem! Search engine and browser will completely block access to your site. If the problem is solved, the reconsideration of the site is very fast and quickly back in the index.
Keyword research: What is very exciting : In Bing Webmaster Tools keyword research is directly possible with search volume. Up to 20 keywords can be entered here.
Backlink analysis: In addition, a Backlink analysis can be carried out for any domain! That means here you get free Backlink data , almost as in the old Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Redirects: Since it can sometimes take up to a year until a redirect is recognized by the search engines, there is the area called “Site move” in the Bing Webmaster Tools = > here you can enter the new redirection URL.
Since each tool has only one part of the complete data (e.g. backlinks) you should aggregate the data and then evaluate. But the Bing Webmaster Tools can certainly provide a strong benefit for webmasters.
This is a post written by Johanna Langer, an SEO Account Director & Conversion Optimization Specialist with the agency blueSummit in Munich. She also worked for the Scout24 group as SEO specialist and has many years of experience in online marketing. Johanna also has a real passion for horse riding.
