We report quite regularly on updates to the Google Webmaster Tools and often forget about the great range of webmaster tools from Bing.

Bing’s Webmaster Tools recently underwent a refresh also, so I thought it was time we provided an overview of what Bing has to offer.

Account Dashboard / Home
The account dashboard provides you with an overview of your site’s performance and outlines any issues which may affect its performance. Simply select the site you want to review and see stats on:

• Clicks – number of users who clicked on your website’s link displayed on the Bing SERPs (search engine result pages)
• Impressions – site link impressions displayed on Bing’s SERPs
• Pages Indexed – pages on your site that were crawled and indexed
• Pages Crawled – pages of your site that were crawled, regardless of if they were indexed

It shows both statistical data as well as chart data to help analyze trends. From this dashboard you can also add or remove sites and export data.

There are 3 additional tabs for each site in your account which provide more detailed information on its performance – Crawl tab, Index tab and Traffic tab.
Let take a look at each one individually:

Crawl Tab
You can check total number of pages crawled as well as pages with crawl errors off the landing page for this category (no exporting unfortunately) and delve into specific sections like:

• Crawl Summary – provides charts on the pages crawled and pages with crawl errors.
• Crawl Settings – allows you to set up custom crawl rates for each individual site. For example, you may want the bot to visit your website when traffic is lease quite (off-peak time).
• Crawl Details – shows you in depth information about errors, redirects, malware, and exclusions detected by Bing during the last crawl of your site.
• Sitemaps – this is where you can upload a new sitemap or see when you sitemap was last uploaded.

Index Tab
There are 7 main areas to the index tab:

• Index Summary – shows the rate at which your site was indexed by Bing over last 6 months.
• Index Explorer – this is an especially helpful tool which alerts you to code problems or confirms correct implementation of things like 301 directs. You can filter the indexed pages by HTTP Code, crawl date range, discovery range, and pages with malware infections or excluded by robots.txt.
• Submit URLs – submit URLs that aren’t already in the Bing index or need to be re-indexed. You can submit up to 50 URLs a month and 10 URLs a day.
• Block URLs – you can also select pages, directories, or an entire site to block from indexing and/or Bing’s cache.
• Inbound Links – here you can view the number of inbound links to your site. You can export these links to a .csv file which is handy
• Deep Links – if you have been luck enough to receive some link love directly from Bing, then these links will appear in this section.
• URL Normalization – this new feature is quite new and helpful for sites that might have issues with duplicate content.

Traffic Tab
The 2 areas of the traffic tab are:

• Traffic Summary – review traffic data and analyze search query performance for the last 6 months. The data shown includes, the search queries, number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate, Average impression position and average click position.
• Page Traffic Report – get detailed information on your top performing pages in Bing. Looking at the performance trends by page can help you determine which pages need to be optimized.

So there you have it – a full wrap-up on the webmaster tools provided by Bing. If you don’t use these tools yet for your website, I strongly suggest setting up an account and getting started.