We recently did a series about Google Webmaster Tools. So we thought it was time to do a series about Bing Webmaster Tools as well. Bing isn’t that big in The Netherlands, or Europe, for that matter, but it still holds some ground in the US. The most important reason, however, is we think Bing Webmaster Tools is pretty awesome. It offers some really nice tools and details you, unfortunately, won’t find in Google Webmaster Tools (anymore).
In this post we’ll go into the first main menu item of Bing Webmaster Tools and its subitems. But first, we’ll explain how you can set it up for your own site!
Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools
Since Bing Webmaster Tools is probably less known than its Google counterpart, we’ll let you know how to set it up! So lets start with the beginning.
You need a Microsoft Live account
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’ll need an @outlook.com or @hotmail.com email address. You can actually use any email address you like. Go here to sign up for a Live account and just follow the steps.
Once you have a Live account, you can go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with the account you just created.
Add your site
After logging in to your Bing Webmaster Tools, you obviously need to add your site:
Fill in your website’s URL here and click ADD. This will take you to this screen:
If you already have a sitemap and you’re aware of it, you can fill in the sitemap here as well. We recommend just leaving the last option on the default, for now. Now you can click the “ADD” button again. Doing this will take you to the following screen:
And this is where the fun comes in. All of this might seem very technical and way over your head. However, if you’re using our WordPress SEO plugin, this is all very easy. Simply copy the entire part in the grey bar and paste it in our plugin here:
Hit “Save Changes” and it’ll remove everything it won’t need, just your ‘key’ will remain. After that hit verify back in the Bing Webmaster Tools setup. If you have some caching, this might not work instantaneously; clear your cache or wait for a bit until you can verify it.
Once you’ve verified it, you’ll be able to access your Bing Webmaster Tools!
Configure My Site
When clicking the ‘Configure My Site’ menu item, you’ll be taken to a dashboard overview of all that you can do in this menu item. You can even do most things right there in the dashboard, which makes it the go to place, once you know what it all does 😉
So lets get to explaining what you can play with in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Sitemaps
The sitemaps menu item is about just that: sitemaps. Here you can (re)submit, remove or export sitemaps. Adding a sitemap is simple, just copy the sitemap’s URL, paste it in the appropriate bar and hit Submit. As with Google, if you have multiple sitemaps under a sitemap index (as our WordPress SEO plugin does for you), you just have to add the sitemap index.
If you’ve added a sitemap index, just clicking that index sitemap’s link will take you to all underlying sitemaps. You can also see whether any errors occurred when crawling your sitemap, when it was last crawled and how many URLs were submitted through the sitemaps, for instance.
Submit URLs
In this section you can add URLs of pages that you think are important directly into the Bing index. This feature is limited to 10 links a day and 50 links a month per domain. Whether this actually makes sure your content is indexed more quickly than through your sitemaps, for instance, remains a bit unclear.
Ignore URL Parameters
URL Parameters are anything after the normal URL, so usually anything after a question mark in your URL. If you want Bing to ignore any of these parameters, you can tell them here. Just to be clear: this will ignore only the parameters, it’ll literally remove the parameters from the URL before adding the page to the index. So this does not mean any URLs with these parameters will not be indexed, you should do that in the Block URLs section.
A URL with parameters is actually viewed as a different URL as the same one without parameters. So “https://yoast.com/?utm_source=” etc… would actually be considered a different URL than just “https://yoast.com/”, even though they end up at the same place. So using this feature can prevent duplicate content.
Crawl Control
This is one of the more nifty tools in the Configure My Site section of Bing Webmaster Tools. You can tell Bing when to crawl your site more and when to crawl it less:
They have some preset crawl rates, which are made to prevent an overload of your server. So when your site is busy, they’ll crawl your site less, and when it’s less busy, they’ll crawl more. However, you can also set a custom crawl rate. Just click in the graph to increase or decrease the crawl rate.
Note: If you have any info on crawl rate specified in your robots.txt, that will take precedence over anything you set up here.
Deep Links
Deep links are the Bing equivalent of Google’s Site Links. If you don’t know what those are either, they’re all the links in the pink block:
In the Deep Links section you can block pages from showing up there. What’s nice about Bing here, is that they allow you to remove the URL showing as a deep link for all URLs, a specific URL or even for a specific country or region.
What’s not so nice about Bing here is that they limited this block to 90 days. The block can be extended, but that means you have to revisit your webmaster tools every 3 months to extend the block you set.
Block URLs
The Block URLs section is very similar to the Deep Links section, in that it blocks URLs from showing up in the Bing search results. Adding a URL here will block the URL from showing up anywhere in the search results of Bing, though.
Annoyingly, they’ve again set the block to a maximum of 90 days, so you should only use this feature if you’ve just deleted a page from your site. Any permanent pages you want to block should be blocked in robots.txt.
Page Preview
The page preview is just that: a preview of your page. Bing doesn’t show this page preview everywhere, but they do in for example Bing Smart Search in Windows. You can tell Bing to refresh or remove the preview of a specific URL here. Just fill in the URL and click Fetch. You’ll then be given a choice to either block the preview or refresh it.
Disavow Links
Here you can disavow links you got from other websites. If you don’t know what disavowing a link means, read the post by Michiel on cleaning up bad backlinks. The best feature here by far is that you’re able to disavow not only a single page link, but also complete directories or domains. This can save you a lot of time when cleaning up your backlinks.
Geo-Targeting
In this section you can set a geo-targeting for your domain, subdomain, directory or page. Geo-targeting means you tell Bing the part of your website you selected is meant for a specific region or country. For instance, if we had a German version of yoast.com under yoast.com/de/, we’d set the geo-targeting for the yoast.com/de/ directory to Germany. This doesn’t mean it won’t show in Bing results in other countries, it just makes it more clear to Bing what people should be seeing the content.
One note about this: although you can set geo-targeting for your domain, if your domain has a country-code (.nl, .de, .co.uk for instance), geo-targeting your entire domain won’t work. Directories and pages can still be geo-targeted.
Verify ownership
If you need to verify your website again, you can do so here.
Connected Pages
Under Connected Pages you can tell Bing any social media presences you have elsewhere. By connecting these pages to Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll be given quite some nice insights. For instance, we’re able to see how many times our twitter account appeared in search and how many times people clicked those appearances. We can even see what keywords people used to get our twitter account to appear, how many backlinks our twitter account (or status updates) has and what anchor texts were used for those links.
App Linking
Here you can link any apps you’ve connected in the Connected Pages section to Bing search results on Windows and Windows Phone. As we don’t have any experience with apps, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what this does exactly! 😉
Users
Here you can manage the users that have access to Bing Webmaster Tools for the current site.
What do you think?
Although Bing is definitely used less than Google, their Webmaster Tools are actually pretty awesome. So if Bing gives you a relevant amount of traffic to your site, it’s definitely something you should check out!
Do you agree? Let me know in the comments!
The next post on the next main menu item in Bing Webmaster Tools, written by Michiel, will be published tomorrow.
This post first appeared as Bing Webmaster Tools: Configure My Site on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!
Source:: SEO
