Bing Webmaster Tools - A Brief Overview

At the end of July, while many of us were off enjoying our summer holidays, Bing released their updated Webmaster Tools based on feedback from the SEO community and various webmasters. Immediately, I decided to sign up and check it out. After using the service for about a month, here is a short comparison of what Bing has to offer vs. Google:

Bing Webmaster

• Crawl Summary (Pages Crawled, Pages with Crawl Errors)
• Index Summary (Pages Indexed)
• Traffic Summary (Impressions & Clicks)
• Queries (Impressions, Clicks & Click-Through-Rate)
• Nice dashboard with large graphical interface thanks to Microsoft Silverlight 4

Google Webmaster

• Same information as Bing plus
  • Search queries with impressions & clicks
  • Number of links
  • Type of crawl errors
  • Keywords
  • List of Indexed URLs
  • Much more…

Google’s dominance in the search engines is blatantly obvious. However, it’s still worth signing up for Bing’s Webmaster tools because let’s face it – the service is free, more features will be released in the coming months, and it can provide you with valuable information.

Microsoft has definitely committed the financial resources necessary to make a play in this space. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next year. We’ll be following closely and will keep you posted!

If you haven’t already submitted your site to Bing, here is the link:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/

If you’re looking for other great dashboard and website analytics templates, check out our Web KPIs Dashboard @ www.demandmetric.com.