Bing updates Webmaster Tools with new utilities

[djbaxter]

Bing Webmaster Tools Update: Link Explorer, New User Experience and so much more
June 6, 2012

Bing today announced a major change to the type of data and depth of guidance found in Webmaster Tools with their Phoenix update:

This update includes a new, fresh user experience, a range of new tools including <var>Link Explorer^beta</var> and <var>SEO Analyzer/SEO Reports^beta</var>, and updates to current tools such as our <var>Keyword Research Tool^beta</var>, and our <var>URL Removal Tool</var>, among others.

New: Link Explorer
The ability to explore link information for any domain is here! Dive deep with this beta tool which allows you to explore links associated with any domain. Simply enter a URL (one at a time) and the tool will supply a list of known links pointing to the specified destination. The default setting will be to display external links pointed at the specified URL, though this can be switched to show internal links as well.

New: SEO Analyzer
Going well beyond listing duplicate or missing this tool has approximately 15 SEO best practices in place. It will scan any URL you enter from one of your verified domains and build a report to let you know if the page scanned is in or out of compliance with each best practice.

New: SEO Reports
Using the same SEO best practices as the new SEO Analyzer^beta tool, the SEO Reports^beta tool will run an SEO report every other week for any domains verified in your account. These reports provide aggregated counts of all the issues found, across each of the websites scanned.

New: Fetch as Bingbot
This tool will allow a webmaster to request Bingbot to crawl a specified page and display the page as the crawler sees it. This could help a webmaster to understand if Bing is actually reaching a page and, since we supply the code we see when we retrieve it, the tool makes troubleshooting easier.

New: Canonical Alerts
Canonical Alerts have been enabled because we see a lot of misuse of the rel=canonical tags. Consequentially, this new alert can help protect you should you make a mistake implementing your canonicals.

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