Bing Unleashes a Ton of New Webmaster Tools for SEO, Links Stats

As Vice President of Bing Program Management Derrick Connell mentioned at the Search Engine Land roundtable talk earlier today, Bing has launched a bevy of new webmaster tools to better inform the understanding of your site’s data and statistics. The addition of several tools and features, which the Bing Team is calling their Phoenix update, offers up everything from SEO analysis tools to a tools for link analysis.

The new arsenal of analytical tools comes on the heels of Friday’s announcement that the new Bing design has become the standard Bing for users in the United States. Some of these tools are brand new while others are merely getting an update or moving out of beta.

The Bing Team says that you should consider this announcement of the tools as an webmaster aperitif because they’ll be providing a more detailed explanation of each tool in the upcoming few weeks. Since Bing has promised to elaborate on each of these tools in the near future, I’m not going to try to out-Bing them so I’ll just include a brief description of each of the updates below. We’ll bring you further information about each new feature or tool as Bing makes the information available.

Probably the most immediate change you’ll see is that Bing has redesigned the Webmaster Tools dashboard. As seen below in the example taken from the Bing blog post, the new look complements the cleaner look to Bing’s search results page.

And now, on to the catwalk.

New Tools:

Link Explorer (beta) – Go spelunking through the internet to discover links associated with any domain.

SEO Reports (beta) – Generate SEO analysis reports directly from Bing. The report uses roughly 15 SEO best practices to generate the analysis and runs once every two weeks for all of the domains you have verified with Webmaster Tools account.

SEO Analyzer (beta) – Similar to the SEO Reports tool, Analyzer will use the same best practices criteria to scan an URL in order to tell you whether or not you’re in compliance with each best practice.

Fetch as Bingbot (beta) – Every curious how the Bing’s web-crawler, Bingbot, sees your site? Now you can find out with this new tool, which will allow a webmaster to send Bingbot crawling across a specific page and display it as the bot sees it.

Canonical Alerts – A new tool to help keep webmasters from erroneously using the rel=canonical tags so your website doesn’t get mistaken as one single page.

The following tools have existed for a bit but received updates with Phoenix.

URL Removal Tool – Simple enough: a tool to allow webmasters to easily block a page from appearing in Bing’s search results.

Keyword Research Tool (beta) – Previously, users were only able to enter one single keyword or phrase per keyword request, but now now webmasters will be able to add multiple entries within the same request.

URL Normalization – Updated the interface to clarify how it works.

Whew. That should be enough to keep you Bing Webmaster Tools users busy for a while, at least until Bing begins to share more information about the hows and whys of each of these tools. To start playing with the tools, users will need a Bing Webmaster Tools account, so happy webmastering and enjoy.