Yesterday we released a change to the way we calculate % Change in the Site Activity widget in the Bing Webmaster Tools Dashboard section. For the metrics Clicks from search, Appeared in search, Pages crawled, and Crawl errors we will now show you the percent change for the selected date range (as selected in the date selector near the top of the dashboard) compared to the prior date range of the same length.  So when you log into your Bing...
Read More

Gang, we’ve got a quick note here to alert users to an item we’ll be shutting down in 60 days. As of April 4th, 2011 we will discontinue support for the bing.com/siteowner functionality.  If you continue to leverage the feature after this date (April 4th, 2011), users who attempt to query in the search box will be redirected to a 404 page.  This means that you will need to move to the Bing API in order to continue to receive...
Read More

We are pleased to announce the release of our new Inbound Links feature. Bing Webmaster Tools now provides registered site owners the ability to easily & intuitively retrieve data about links to their sites.  We received plenty of feedback from site owners and SEOs that expressed the importance of this data to better understand how their sites are ranked in Bing and to make the right improvements.   The new functionality...
Read More

Early this month, in the Bingbot is Coming to Town blog post, we provided details about the impending change from msnbot to bingbot.  It’s almost October 1st, so we thought we’d send out a quick reminder that this change is still in the works. Taking into account webmaster feedback, we have modified our rollout schedule a bit. Instead of doing an 100% switch on day one, we will do a staged rollout.  What does that mean to...
Read More

Thinking I’d be original, I first titled this post, “Changes, they are a-coming”.  When I Bing’d that title, I realized that ‘original’ isn’t the correct descriptor . . . so, I went searching for inspiration to aid in finding words to convey the importance and need for change, and came up with some great quotes, a few of my favorites: “Everything changes and nothing remains still” –...
Read More

Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1st, 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details, what the change means in terms of...
Read More

In our continuing efforts to provide great value to our publishers, the Bing Engineering team is constantly testing new features to improve crawl efficiency. Such experiments are vital to our ability to innovate and improve our end user and publisher experience. Due to an upcoming experiment, a few sites may encounter an intermittent increase (anywhere from 5% to 25%) in crawl requests from MSNBot over the next month (specifically from August...
Read More

Today, we are announcing the release of new features for the Bing Webmaster tools. These features are a direct response to feedback we’ve received since our launch last month which was announced in Anthony’s “A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools” blog post. The loudest feedback was, “I want to download my data!” . . . so, we’ve added a new data export capability which enables you to export and download...
Read More

Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools. After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing. So what’s new in...
Read More

I have a quick post today. The Bing Developer Center blog recently published an informative post on using the Bing Advanced Query Language. The guide they reference covers a deep dive into search command operators with detailed descriptions and examples. I thought this might be of interest to the webmaster community as well, so I am posting a link to it here. For more information, check out the post Guide to Bing Query Language Published...
Read More