Everything you need to know about Bing’s updated webmaster tools

Yes, you do not use Bing. Neither do I. But some people do, enough that webmasters and other such people have to pay it some mind. After all, how are people going to find their dose of Kardasiawhater if the Internet’s sites aren’t well tuned?

Today Bing released an update to its suite of webmaster tools, working to promote, according to the company’s notes, increased transparency, more shared data, and more total features. Or, more simply, to make interacting with Bing less difficult and more useful.

What is in the update? We have broken it down into useful bullet points to save you time:

• Expanded crawl information: Bing is now sharing more information from its crawl process, including being “no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.”
• Improved email alerts: Bing will email you if it wants to change how it crawls your site. That is, if it wants to get up in your business a bit more.
• Increased URL normalization power: Bing will now allow for up to 50 “query string parameters that can be normalized” that can be normalized per website.
• Increased data provided by Bing’s Index Explorer.
• Expanded DNS verification for domains, including a “third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain.”
• Integrated data from AdCenter: “when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.”

It’s a good list of solid incremental improvements to Bing’s toolkit. In its blog post, Microsoft cited a year’s worth of listening to come up with this specific list of upgrades. You can therefore hope that the company managed to put together a strong blend of updates that were honestly needed. It appears so.

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In other Bing news, its global market share is all but flat.