by samWith Bing and Yahoo! pursuing a joint venture by combining their search results in an attempt to catch up with main SERP rival Google, Bing is presently re-examining and updating its webmaster tools to develop search engine optimisation and its customer base.
Bing took some time out to focus on what they were lacking and what needed improving by asking their users and people at search conferences what they wanted to see on the site. From this feedback, Bing developed a better understanding of what their consumers wanted, and the Honey Badger update was developed. The Honey Badger focused on revising the webmaster experience and investing in areas that had been neglected previously. Content has been promised to be added monthly, and in the Bing webmasters centre blogs, they have been listing topics they would like to cover and improve.
Major features that the Honey Badger focused on were ‘Crawl-delay configurable by the hour’, ‘Index Explorer’, and ‘User and role management’. These improvements were implemented and received great feedback, encouraging Bing to invest in more content and feature improvements and increase their search engine optimisation overall.
The focuses of the latest improvements have been released and include sitemaps, communication, internationalisation, and expanded navigation. The sitemap file type expansion means that users can now upload more sitemap types than the solitary sitemap.xml files that they were restricted to previously, with hints of more expansion in that field to come.
Communication facilities have been enhanced, with the introduction of being able to switch on an alert system so that Bing can send messages straight to your inbox if they believe there to be any malware issues with your site that need to be dealt with quickly. This direct response system is designed to keep the user informed and up-to-date shortly after any issues go live.
Probably one of the most popular developments is the breaking down of the language barrier. All features of the webmaster tools are now available in 42 languages, encouraging international users to use and explore Bing to its full potential.
The expanded navigation has the benefit of pure simplicity at its core. Bing has listened to the people and made what used to be complicated in their features simpler. Navigating your Webmasters account is now a lot easier, and there are extra tabs (where appropriate) to find what you are looking for and to find the data within your account.
Each improvement takes time and energy, but Bing is proving its worth in their race against Google by slowly reaching out to more consumers through these developments.