Redmond, Washington — Keeping up to the promise it made to Webmasters, Microsoft’s Bing has disclosed the news in a blog post about some pretty hefty enhancements it has released to Webmaster Tools in an update called “Honey Badger” that will give you more configuration and deeper customization to manage their sites’ visibility on Bing search engine results, so that they can make any required modifications to recover how Bing crawls their pages content and ranks their website pages.
Internally dubbed as “Honey Badger,” the updated features have the capability to manage how speedily the Bing crawler indexes a web pages and content at different times of the day, which enables webmasters to control the crawling activity at peak traffic hours, so that Bing does not put additional stress on the Web servers.
The refurbished webmaster tools adds three new features: crawl delay management, index explorer, and user and role management. This can be set by adjusting the crawl rates on a graph, Bing said on Wednesday.
“Today’s redesign offers webmasters a simplified experience that allows them to quickly analyze and identify trends — while also bringing new and unique features to the industry,” according to WebProNews, citing a representative for Bing as saying. “Our goal is to help webmaster make faster, more informed decisions and drive new insights about their website by presenting them with rich visuals and more organized, relevant content.”
However, some other changes include updates to the toolbox site, including over 40 new educational documents, self-help guides and videos and the ability for webmasters to manage deep links.
Moreover, Microsoft also did a “complete rewrite” of Index Explorer, a tool that displays webmasters how Bing has indexed their sites, by refreshing its data more swiftly, improving its performance and making it more extensible, the company said in a statement.
Enhancements include:
Crawl Delay Management: Allows webmasters to configure the BingBot crawl rate for a specific domain. Crawl deal is configurable by hour. For instance, if you would prefer Bing to crawl your site during hours where your site is not as used, you can specify that. This tool features a neat, AJAX-based drag-and-drop interface to draw which hours you want to set the BingBot crawl rate.
Furthermore, users can command Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours or have it crawl faster during non-peak hours. Besides, there is drag-and-drop functionality that lets users create a crawl graph by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer across the graph. Individual columns can also be clicked for fine-tuning.
Index Explorer: Empower webmasters access to information contained in the Bing index about a particular domain. Previously called Index Tracker, this newly refurbished tool gives webmasters transparency about Bing’s data on site performance, freshness, failure detection, extensibility and many other features. This information does not need to be collected by Bingbot. It already exists in Bing’s databases. Webmasters will be allowed access to this data as soon as they sign their domain up.
User and Role Management Tool: Provides site owners with the ability to permit Toolbox access to other users for their domain. Various roles including read-only, read/write or full admin rights can now be offered to multiple users for a particular site. Admins can also restrict (or grant) access to specific folders or subdomains.
Additionally, webmasters can now authorize other colleagues to access their sites’ Bing Webmaster Tools account, and assign them different privileges, such as read-only, read-write and full administrator access.
The software titan is also beefing up its webmaster self-help documentation and videos that include information on link building, controlling your site in Bing’s index, Canonicalization, redirects and even the new rich snippets implementation at the newly launched partnership site schema.org.