How-to Use: Bing Webmaster Center Tools

Previously, we showed you how-to submit your sitemap to Bing without giving you much detail about the full range of features from Bing Webmaster Center Tools. This web application from Bing (Microsoft) was designed to address important questions from webmasters, such as whether your website has been indexed or blocked by Bing or if there are website crawling issues.

In other words, Bing Webmaster Center Tools gives a look to make sure that your website is working well with Bing's MSNBot (The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching).

Bing Webmaster Center Tools Features

The Bing Webmaster Center Tools will help you ensure that your website is being crawled and indexed by Bing, and identify any issues Bing encountered while crawling your website. This is in addition to submitting your sitemaps and identifying which websites link to yours. Here is a list and a summary of each webmaster tool:

1. Summary Tool - Shows when your site and top 5 pages were last crawled, their static score and if they are blocked by Bing.
2. Profile Tool- An important configuration page for your main Sitemap and to enter an email address where Bing will send you notifications if there are technical problems indexing your site.
3. Crawl Issues Tool - See issues Bing identified while crawling your site such as pages returning a files not found (404), blocked by a Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP), having a too long dynamic URL, a malware infected or an unsupported content-type.
4. Backlinks Tool - Find all external links to your website, with that you can identify how a specific website is referencing your website and perform more backlink analysis by downloading the results.
5. Outbound Links Tool - See the list of URLs found on your website and ensure that you are not linking to sites containing malware (which might penalize your rankings).
6. Keywords Tool - See how your website performs against searches for a specific keyword or key phrase, this search is limited to the pages within your domain (similar to Google Site Search)
7. Sitemaps Tool - Enables you to provide Webmaster Center with a comprehensive list of the content you would like Bing to crawl. You can submit your Sitemap by sending the URL or your Sitemap file directly to Bing. Read our guide on how to submit your sitemap to Bing and the other search engines.
8. Robots.txt Validation Tool - Use this Robots.txt validation tool to evaluate your Robots.txt file with respect to MSNBot’s implementation of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). You can validate your current Robots.txt file or check any changes you’ve made to it before you add it to your website.

These Bing Webmaster Center Tools can be used as soon as you signup. Which we describe as follows.

How-to Sign up to Bing Webmaster Center Tools

In order to use all these Bing Webmaster Tools, you need to:

• Sign in or create a Windows Live ID - Similar to Google Accounts or Yahoo! Accounts, Bing will require you to use their proprietary identity management system to use Bing Webmaster Tools. They must have made the decision to keep the Windows Live brand for interoperability with the upcoming Office Live.
• Authenticate your Website - There are two methods of authentication, both of which rely on Bing Webmaster Center accessing the authentication code you've added to a registered website. You can upload a provided XML file to your site root or add a Meta Tag to your default site root.

If you have used Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center's Site Authentication should be a very similar process.

Bing Webmaster Center Tools < Google Webmaster Tools

If you have used Google Webmaster Tools recently, you may feel that Bing Webmaster Tools is something you will set and forget - you are right. As opposed to Google which boasts features such as

When reading this, you may have questions on Bing Webmaster Center Tools, if so, please post them in the comments below as other may answer them.

We certainly had some topics to inquire such as the Page Score or Static Score displayed on numerous pages of the Bing Webmaster Tools. We will post more details when our research is completed, subscribe to our RSS feed to see more useful articles on website promotion.