The Ultimate Guide to Bing Webmaster Tools – Explore Each & Every Feature
Microsoft Bing is the second most popular internet search engine after Google. The organic traffic it generates may look minuscule compared to Google, but it is still worth your attention. Reaping the full benefits of Bing Webmaster Tools can help you gain an extra SEO advantage for your website.
Besides that, the new Bing Chat feature has been a sensation in the search engine sphere. One thing is for certain, the power of Bing should not be ignored! In this definitive guide to Bing Webmaster Tools, we will explore every aspect of the platform, right from the initial setup to its powerful SEO features.
To start, we’ll go over some fundamentals of Microsoft Bing Webmaster tools:
and then we’ll explore the platform and sift through each of its sections:
- Home
- Search Performance
- URL Inspection
- Site Explorer
- Sitemaps
- IndexNow
- URL Submission
- SEO
- Configuration
Tip: Bookmark this page to refer to it as your go-to resource hub to master Bing Webmaster Tools! 😀
What is Bing Webmaster Tools?
Just like Google Search Console, Bing offers a set of Webmaster Tools to maintain the site’s presence on the Bing search engine.
Bing Webmaster Tools help website owners submit their website sitemap for indexing, fix crawling and indexing issues, and monitor the site’s performance. The toolset offers powerful features that make it easier for the webmaster to optimize their site for search engines.
Working on Bing SEO? Read our latest post on Bing Search Algorithm to know how to crack it!
How to Set up Bing Webmaster Tools?
First, you need to log into Bing Webmaster Tools using any of these accounts:
- Microsoft
Once logged in, click on Add a Site option to get started with the Bing Webmaster Tools setup.
Note: If you already have Google Search Console set up on your website, you can skip these manual steps, and import your site instantly by connecting the Google account.
Now, follow these steps to submit the website to Bing and complete the setup:
- Step 1: Under the Add your site manually section, enter your website address and click on the Add button.
- Step 2: In the next step, you can choose any of these three methods for Bing Webmaster Tools Verification:
- XML File
- HTML Meta Tag
- Add CNAME Recode to DNS
In this tutorial, we are going to use the HTML Meta Tag method. Copy the tag as shown in the screenshot below.
- Step 3: Add the copied HTML Meta Tag in the <head> section of your website. The steps to do that will vary as per your CMS platform. It is found in the Theme Edit section. Edit the theme in HTML mode, and add the meta tag anywhere between the
<head>and</head>tags. See the below screenshot for an example:
- Step 4: Now, come back to the Bing Webmaster Tools setup, and click on the Verify button to add your website.
On successful Bing Webmaster Tools verification, the site will be added to your Bing Webmaster Tools account, and a success message will be displayed on the screen.
Ta-daa!! 🎉 Our website has been successfully added to the Bing Webmaster Tools. Now, we’re ready to go ahead! 🚀
Home (Previously Known as Dashboard)
The Home section in the Bing Webmaster Tools provides a quick look at the site’s performance.
News, updates, and other important notifications will also be displayed at the top of this section.
Under the Reports, the Search Performance section provides a quick glance at the site’s performance on the Bing Search engine. It displays metrics, such as clicks and impressions of the website.
Next, the Bing SEO Reports section shows the number of search engine optimization-related issues on the site, according to their severity. There is also a section for URL submissions.
Each of the sections under the Reports helps webmasters analyze the performance of their live site.
You can explore more about each of the reports by clicking on View complete report.
The Home section can be useful to monitor your site’s performance regularly.
In the left menu bar, you can find other sections of the Bing search console, which can be used for navigation.
Search Performance
In the Search Performance section, you can see the following metrics for your site’s performance on Bing Search:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Avg. CTR
- Avg. Position
- Crawl Requests
- Crawl Errors
- Indexed Pages
The data is displayed in chart format over the selected time period.
You can select/unselect the metrics per your need.
You can also find the top-ranking keywords/pages with each of the selected metrics under the chart.
The Search Performance section also allows you to analyze the data over a specific period.
The drop-down menu provided at the top-right corner of the section allows you to select the duration from:
- 7 days
- 30 days
- 3 months
- 6 months
- Custom
In the custom duration, you can enter a custom date range. You can access data old up to 6 months.
Further, you can drill down your analysis by exploring the page-specific metrics.
In the Last By, switch to the Pages and select a specific page to get its ranking keywords, clicks, impressions, and other metrics.
You can also export the tables into .csv file for further analysis.
A major downside of using Webmaster Tools of Bing is that there are no search or filter functionalities.
URL Inspection
The next useful feature of Bing Webmaster Tools is the URL Inspection tool.
It allows webmasters to check the page in the Bing search index, find issues, and more.
Just enter the page URL, and click on Inspect to look up for the page!
It displays the current index status of the web page in Bing.
Here, you can find:
- Discovered on (First index date)
- Last crawl date
- Crawl allowed (Yes/no)
- Page Fetch (Successful/unsuccessful)
- Indexing allowed (Yes/no)
- Canonical URL
If you’ve recently updated the page, and want Bing to re-index it, you can also submit an indexing request.
Click Request indexing at the top-right corner of the section of the URL Inspection page to do that.
The URL Inspection tool also lists down the issues found during the page crawl, which you can fix to optimize for Bing SEO.
It also scans the page for schema markups and lists the detected structured data types. This can help you make sure your web pages are optimized for rich snippets.
You can also inspect the Live URL of the webpage and check for crawlability and Bing SEO issues.
Site Explorer
Bing’s Site Explorer feature presents the entire website uniquely to discover technical issues affecting SEO.
Webmasters can find a breakdown of the entire website in a directory format, crawl information, folder information, and more in the Microsoft console for Bing.
You can use this feature to find technical issues within your website and fix them.
By default, the site explorer presents all the web pages indexed in Bing.
You can apply the Filter option, present on the top of Explorer, to only show the URLs with technical issues.
You can also export the entire index and crawl data into .csv file!
This can be pretty useful when you’re working on improving the technical side of your website’s SEO.
Sitemaps
Now, this is an important section to look at after you set up Microsoft Webmaster Tools.
In layperson’s terms, sitemaps are like phone books to search engines. They contain addresses of all the web pages on a website and help search engines easily find them.
The Sitemaps section of the Bing search console displays the known sitemaps, the number of URLs, and the issues & warnings discovered.
Keeping a regular watch on this section is important to make sure all the web pages are crawled and indexed by Bing.
Further, you can also submit sitemap to Bing through this section.
To do that, just click on the Submit sitemap button on the top right of the page.
Next, enter the URL to the Bing sitemap and click on Submit to add sitemap to Bing.
On successful submission, the sitemap will soon appear in the Sitemap section of Bing Webmaster Tools.
IndexNow
IndexNow is a protocol that pings the Bing search engine instantly in case of a change in the content or URL of a web page.
This makes the changes reflect instantly in Bing’s index and faster discovery of the web page.
You can use the IndexNow API in your content management system (CMS) to submit URLs automatically for updates. WordPress users can install the official IndexNow plugin for that.
The IndexNow section in Bing Webmaster Tools displays the log of the submitted URLs.
URL Submission
In this section, you can manually submit URLs to Bing for crawling. This can be useful to request Bing to crawl and discover new URLs on your website.
You can submit up to 10000 URLs every day.
In the URL Submission section, click Submit URLs.
Next, enter the list of the URLs (one per line) and hit the Submit button.
The URL Submission section also lists the recently submitted URLs and their statuses.
SEO
Bing console offers some simple yet powerful tools to optimize your website for Bing SEO.
These tools can be a powerful addition to your SEO toolset; the reason is—these tools draw their data directly from the Bing search engine index.
Bing Webmaster SEO Toolset includes:
Let’s explore each of the Bing SEO tools.
Backlinks
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools can be a reliable backlink analysis tool.
It can be the ultimate backlink analyzer if you are focusing on Bing search engine optimization.
The reason is—the backlinks data is pulled directly from the Bing index.
You can use it to:
- Find sites linking to your website to measure content popularity.
- Analyze the backlink profile of your competitors.
- Compare your backlink profile with any of your competitors and find backlink opportunities.
- Disavow spammy links to your website.
In this section, you can have a glance at your backlink profile, through link metrics.
The tool lists the backlinks by domains, pages, and anchor texts.
You can drill down further by clicking on the domain or page to get the linking web pages.
The best part is—all the data can be exported directly to a .csv file using the Download All button.
You can also analyze your competitor’s backlink profile just like yours and down their data too. 😀
Keyword Research
This tool can also be an excellent addition to your SEO arsenal.
It helps you find the keywords, search volume, and trends of search queries on the Bing search engine.
You can also narrow down the search by choosing the country, language, and device.
The keyword research tool also lists the related keywords, questions, and newly discovered terms.
Further, you can narrow down your research by choosing the duration for the keyword research.
Complete data can be exported to a .csv file, which can be further used for the analysis.
SEO Reports
This section in the Bing search console lists the common technical errors related to SEO, such as
- Multiple titles
- Missing descriptions
- Description too long or short
- Missing
altattributes in images
and more…
The tool categorizes the errors according to their severity.
You can also export the pages with issues to .csv file for fixing.
The SEO Reports section is useful to make your website optimized for other search engines as well, not just Bing.
Site Scan
In this section, you can generate an on-demand SEO report for your entire website or a specific directory.
Go to the Site Scan section, and click on the Start New Scan button.
Next, fill up the required details and submit the scan request.
You can request up to 10,000 pages per month through this. You can learn more about the Site Scan tool through this insightful article in Search Engine Journal. Thanks to Matt G. Southern for crafting such a useful article!
Configuration
Webmasters can also configure the crawling and indexing of web pages through Bing’s search console.
In the Crawl Control, you can specify the preferred time for Bing to crawl your website.
This feature can be useful in reducing the web server load during busy times.
The Block URLs section can be helpful if you want to remove any webpage from appearing in the Bing search results.
Other useful tools you can leverage in Bing Webmaster Tools are robots.txt Tester and Verify Bingbot, which lets you find out if an IP address you found in your server log belongs to a Bingbot or not!
Finishing Remarks on Bing Webmaster Tools
Mastering the Bing Webmaster Tools can help you have an edge in SEO. Microsoft Bing holds almost 9% of the market share; why miss this opportunity? The search console provided by Bing is albeit very basic as compared to that of Google, but let’s not ignore its capabilities and cherish it to get some extra traffic. In this definitive guide, I’ve covered almost all the major features of the Bing Webmaster platform.
Now, it’s your time to take action! Set up Bing Webmaster Tools now, and start leveraging it. If you need any help in starting your Bing SEO journey, here is our helpful guide for you: The Ultimate Guide To Bing SEO In 2023
In case you are facing any difficulties using the platform, feel free to comment. I’d be glad to help you.
Thank You! 🍀
Prev
Learn to Create Checkout-like Step Progress Bar In Magento 2 – Complete Code + Explanation
The Ultimate Showdown of ChatGPT Vs. Bard Vs. Bing
Next