If you’ve taken the chance to work with the Bing Webmaster Tools you’re in for a happy surprise today. Bing has put the word out in a blog post about some pretty hefty changes to the system that will give you more configuration and deeper customization.
Crawling Delays
Busy time? You can make sure that Bing crawls a bit slower so that it doesn’t interrupt normal traffic. Want to set up crawling times? You can now do that in your Crawl Settings panel by dragging and dropping a graph by the hour.
New Index Explorer
This isn’t just an improvement, according to the team, it’s a complete re-write. Index Tracker will now focus more on these six points:
- Freshness
- Performance
- Extensibility
- Reduced machine footprint
- Stability and failure detection
- New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they sign up
Role Management
With no change to code, you can now let other people have admin or read and write access to your site via a Users panel:
This is the sort of upgrade that Bing has been releasing over the past twelve months: incremental improvements to core technologies that impact both searchers, and webmasters. Today’s changes will certainly help those who run websites interact with Bing, something that might persuade more to do just that. That won’t boost Bing’s market share directly, but it could improve its results, which in turn could grow its search volume.
Sound off in the comments, does this sort of upgrade by Bing help it in its struggle against Google, or is it just spinning its wheels?
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