Bing Webmaster Tools: Diagnostics & Tools

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Bing Webmaster Tools Diagnostics Tools

• Bing Webmaster Tools provides a number of tools
  to analyze your website. Somehow, they managed
  to squeeze these into one page in Bing Webmaster
  Tools as the dashboard page for the section
  Diagnostics Tools. Fortunately, all tools also
  have a separate page In this post, we will go
  over all tools and tell you how to use these to
  your advantage.
• This is already our third article on Bing
  Webmaster Tools. In case you have missed the
  first two, go read these here
• Bing Webmaster Tools Configure my site
• Bing Webmaster Tools Reports Data
• Keyword Research beta
• Out of the five tools described in this article,
  Bing classifies most as beta. With all these
  tools, we also have to keep in mind that we are
  dealing with data from organic search at Bing.
  Lets start with the Keyword Research tool

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I have tested this tool using a number of
WordPress SEO related keywords for our website.
As you can see, you can set a country and
language, as well as a time frame from your
research. I chose the US, US English and changed
the default last 30 days to January 2015. Note
that, as with Google Webmaster Tools, there is a
gap between today and the end of your data Bing
Webmaster Tools goes up to 3 days ago. The tiny
Strict option in there is to determine whether
you want the research to be done for exact
phrases or phrases containing the keyword. As Id
like to investigate general keywords (WordPress,
plugin, seo), I have left this option unchecked
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All results can be sorted, by the way. Just click
the (blue) title of a column. First thing that
comes to mind is that the Google Keyword Planner
shows 550K searches for WordPress in January
2015. Bing Webmaster Tools shows 60K. Weve
already mentioned that the search volume in
Googles keyword planner isnt always useful, and
the same must apply to these Bing numbers.
The -icon behind the keyword is a hint. You can
actually buy the keyword here directly. Thats
pretty straightforward ) I still feel that if
you properly optimize your website, you can get
more clicks as well from organic results. Not
trying to ruin your revenue model here, Bing.
Paid results seem to work fine if you have
narrowed down your niche and target these
specific visitors. If the ad / paid result tells
me what I need (to know), Ill click it without a
doubt. In the first table, you see search volume
and trends. These are not just going up, by the
way ) If you choose a longer period of time, it
also wont be just a straight line ) It will
tell you what the rise or drop in search volume
is as well. You can click all the results, but
doing so will just filter the results, it wont
give you more details. By the way, just to be
complete, you must have seen the Suggestions as
well in the screenshots above. These keywords
are additional keywords, related to your original
keyword by relevancy. Its a nice tool, but
being used to the keyword tools we normally use,
this isnt one Ill use very often. Perhaps the
release version will have some features that will
make it more attractive?
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• Link Explorer
• This is Bings alternative for MajesticSEO,
  OpenSiteExplorer and more backlink tools like
  that. It allows you to find all backlinks known
  to Bing for any site. It has a few filters
• Filter by site only pages on your website
  linking to that URL.
• Anchor text only links that use this anchor
  text.
• Additional query only pages that link and that
  rank for the search keyword as well.
• Scope links to the URL entered only or all pages
  from that domain.
• Source only links from the site at hand
  (internal) or all links to that URL (external).
• For that last one, you probably want to use the
  inbound link tool at Reports Data instead.
  Its more comprehensive and for instance provides
  you with the exact anchor text for each link.
• The result of the Link Explorer tool is something
  like this

Clicking the Source URL will perform a link
analysis in Bing Webmaster Tools for that
domain, clicking the title will get you to the
website itself. What I am missing here is total
search volumes, and some more details on the
domain. MajesticSEO adds Trust and Citation
flow, Moz OpenSiteExplorer adds both page and
domain authority. Right now, the filters are what
making this section on Bing Webmaster Tools
interesting, not per se the (outcome of the)
general exploration. if I wanted to check all
the pages that link to our domain using
WordPress plugins, this tool works fine. Fetch
as Bingbot beta Like Fetch as Google, this will
tell you how the search engine bot sees your
website. Simply enter your URL and click Fetch
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After the fetch is done, status will change from
Pending to Completed. Now you can click the
Status and see how Bing sees your website
(clicking the URL will simply get you to the
page itself). Where Google Webmaster Tools (now
known as Google Search Console) actually renders
your website as well, Bing displays the server
response and your source code, as seen by
Bingbot, of course. It will tell you if a page is
redirected, or blocked by your robots.txt, for
example. Markup Validator beta I really like
this one, to be honest. As it is totally
unrelated to search traffic in terms of volume,
this tools is a nice substitute for Googles Rich
Snippet Test tool. I dont know if it is just
getting used to something new, but I liked the
clean setup of that Google tool like it was a
few weeks ago. Bing tells me just what I need to
know is schema.org implemented correctly?
It is. It will also tell you about RDFa, which
you still want to use for breadcrumbs, for
instance. Nice extra is that this Bing Webmaster
tool also extracts the OpenGraph data.
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And yes, I understand the new Google test tool
explains what is wrong (according to Google,
that is), but if you just want to see what
schema.org / RDFa / OpenGraph is on a page, this
tool actually works just fine! The Rich Snippet
Test tool keeps on telling me to link the last
element in my breadcrumbs, but why should I link
to the page the visitor is already on? From a UX
stand, that seems odd SEO Analyzer beta There
we go Bing Webmaster Tools gives you a free SEO
analyzer to cover all the basics (for more in
depth analysis, check our site reviews). You can
simply insert a URL and see what basics can be
improved. This is very much like the HTML
Improvements in Google Webmaster Tools. There is
also some overlap with the SEO Reports in Bing
Webmaster Tools, but the SEO analyzer is a single
page analyzing tool.
It will tell you if H1s are missing, which
images lack ALT tags and for instance if a page
is missing language information. I especially
like the way it is displayed, with a direct
reference to the error on the Analyzed tab on
the right
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• Two things to keep in mind when using the SEO
  Analyzer
• SEO Analyzer, unlike Bingbot, will ignore
  robots.txt directives, so you can basically
  check any page on your site.
• SEO Analyzer follows any redirect and analyzes
  the page it end up on. It will tell you that a
  redirect is detected and followed (right below
  the SEO Suggestions).
• Verify Bingbot Tool
• So why would you want to know what IP address the
  Bingbot is? Well, the Bingbot might be
  overcrawling your website, unintendedly sending
  more than the usual server load your way. With
  this tool, you can verify if the IP address that
  is causing this load, is indeed Bingbot, which
  is needed for your support request. By the way,
  Bing does respect that crawl-delay line in your
  robots.txt. That might already help.
• It seems to me that this tools should be
  incorporated in a workload. The fact that it is
  displayed here as a separate section, seems a bit
  too much honor for that tool.
• Site Move
• If you are moving your site to a new domain, be
  sure to let Bing Webmaster Tools know. Its
  pretty easy

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Just make sure both sites are verified. This can
be done for entire domains, subdomains and
directories. If you are moving a larger part of
your website, like yoast.com/plugins to
yoast.com/wp-plugins, this is also the section
where you can see if all went well. Note that
this is just a notification, it has nothing to do
with actually moving a site or directory.