In February Bing announced it was working on a new Bing Webmaster Tools, we saw some early screen shots of it then. Today is the day this new version goes completely live and within the next month the old tool will be gone.
You can access the new Bing Webmaster Tools at bing.com/webmasters/, the old one will be at bing.com/webmaster (without an S) for the next 30 days or so.
URL Inspection Tool
With this launch, Bing added a bunch of new features but one feature I did not cover before and is new, is the URL Inspection Tool that allow you "to inspect Bing indexed version of your URLs allowing to detect potential indexing issues due to crawl or not following Bing Webmaster guidelines." Here is what it looks like:
If you expand the indexing section, it shows you when Bing discovered the URL, when was the last crawl attempt, was it crawled, fetched and indexed and any canonical information:
If you click on any of the issues, it will explain how you can fix them with this pop up for the "meta language tag missing" warning:
What Else...
We already saw the new features including crawl control, URL submission, blocking URLs and more. Also a new site scan tool and robots.txt tester tool. Also, Bing released revamped Webmaster guidelines.
There is more to come including a refreshed version of the Index Explorer tool this coming summer and much much more. Fabrice from Microsoft said this will not be a simple port of the tool but a revamped version:
We will not port Index Explorer (my favorite tool) .. we will enable better (my new favorite tool) soon. https://t.co/A3HYtCqj27
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) July 30, 2020
Bing said the Bing Webmaster APIs are not changing, so use them as you currently do.
Great UX work Dhilan! https://t.co/Il0oxwEhqj
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) July 30, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
