What: At SMX West on Wednesday, Microsoft Bing announced it will release the first new, refreshed and improved version of Bing Webmaster Tools in the first week of March. It promises to offer a faster, cleaner, and more responsive set of features for SEOs and Webmasters, starting with the Backlinks Report, Search Performance and Sitemaps.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free tool offered by Microsoft Bing, allowing website owners to add their sites to the Microsoft Bing web crawler, view site performance and much more. It’s very similar to Google Search Console in terms of purpose and fundamental features.
Why: In an announcement, the company said they’d heard from the webmaster ecosystem that the “Bing Webmaster Tools user interface is slow and outdated”. They continued, stating that they’d taken feedback into consideration and are working on modernising the tools and that they’re “delighted to announce the first iteration of the refreshed Bing Webmaster Tools portal”.
The result: The new portal will be released to a select set of users this week (18th February onwards) and will be rolling out to all users at the beginning of March. Here are the new features in detail:
- Backlinks: The inbound links report in the current portal has been integrated with the disavow links tool, which now makes up the new backlinks report.
- Search Performance: Page traffic and search keywords reports are integrated as one to make up the new search performance report.
- Sitemaps: A refreshed version of the current sitemaps portal with a brand new look.
Microsoft Bing also added that “over the next few months”, they will be spending time moving all the functionality to the new portal.
