Back in June, 2010, we published a blog post titled Bing crawler: bingbot on the horizon that announced our plans to retire our venerable web crawler, MSNBot, and replace it with the new. Our plans remain on track, and we want to remind you that this change will occur on October 1 st , 2010. We also want to take this opportunity to help set some expectations for this process, to discuss the name change details, what the change means in terms of control crawler access to your content, and finally cover what is not changing as part of this process. Name change As of October 1 st , you'll start seeing the following user agent name in your server logs: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http:...
In our continuing efforts to provide great value to our publishers, the Bing Engineering team is constantly testing new features to improve crawl efficiency. Such experiments are vital to our ability to innovate and improve our end user and publisher experience. Due to an upcoming experiment, a few sites may encounter an intermittent increase (anywhere from 5% to 25%) in crawl requests from MSNBot over the next month (specifically from August 25 th through end of September). If you see an increased crawl rate on your site and want to throttle it down, please contact bwmc@microsoft.com as soon as possible, and we will address your concerns. Thanks for your understanding as we try to improve Bing...
Today, we are announcing the release of new features for the Bing Webmaster tools. These features are a direct response to feedback we've received since our launch last month which was announced in Anthony's " A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools " blog post. The loudest feedback was, "I want to download my data!" . . . so, we've added a new data export capability which enables you to export and download data from Bing Webmaster Tools about your registered sites. You can export up to six months of data in the form of a downloadable, comma-delimited CSV file. The following data downloads are available by selecting the 'Export' button in the UI: Type Available data fields Export Crawl, Index,...
In my last post , I started digging in to the many great new features offered in the new Bing Webmaster Tools . We have so much to talk about that I needed two posts to cover it! Let's get right back in the saddle and ride this horse back home. Note: As in the Tips and Tricks Part 1 post , the features I discuss here are primarily based on the Silverlight version of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. While there is a basic, down level version of the tools available, the Silverlight version offers greatly enhanced functionality and is the recommended way to get the full effect the tool's rich index data offerings and advanced features for your website. Add more of your URLs to the index Have you just...
I trust by now everyone has heard the big news : the new Bing Webmaster Tools are here! I have been working with it for quite some time now. I like the new look and feel of the Silverlight -based user interface. It is clean, intuitive, and easy to use. As the primary contributor to the tool's documentation, I've had some interesting discoveries as the tools were developed, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to highlight some interesting features and share some cool tips and tricks that I've learned. If you are already a registered user, sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and follow along. If you haven't signed up yet, what's holding you back? Note: The features I discuss here are based on the...
Today, we’re announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools . After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing. So what’s new in the updated Bing Webmaster Tools? Everything. With your feedback in mind, the Bing Webmaster Team decided to hit the reset button and rebuild the tools from the ground up. The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience...
Editor's note: In our continuous effort to make this blog as compelling as possible to our large and diverse audience, we are expanding the scope of the Bing Webmaster Center blog. Starting with this post, we will host occasional posts from "guest bloggers" from within Microsoft who work on search or use search-related technologies in their daily jobs. They will offer the perspective of a user of search engine optimization (SEO) services (just like you!) rather than that of a search engine offering prescriptive SEO advice. Let us know what you think and what topics you'd like to see covered in future posts with a comment here. Thanks for being a member of the Bing Webmaster Center community!...
I have a quick post today. The Bing Developer Center blog recently published an informative post on using the Bing Advanced Query Language. The guide they reference covers a deep dive into search command operators with detailed descriptions and examples. I thought this might be of interest to the webmaster community as well, so I am posting a link to it here. For more information, check out the post Guide to Bing Query Language Published . Enjoy! See you again soon! -- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
Since our last post in November , the Bing team has been busy rolling out improvements to the Bing web crawler. As a result of this work, we want to announce in advance our plans to change the name of our crawler (aka user agent). Out of beta with a new name On October 1 st , 2010 , we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft's new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below: From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com will become From: bingbot...
This is the last of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review ( Part 1 ), then took an initial look at page-level issues ( Part 2 ), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues ( Part 3 and Part 4 ), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this last post, we'll look at additional, architectural issues that should also be examined in a site review. Duplicate content conundrums Aside from duplicate indexed content arising from the lack of canonicalization as discussed in Part 4 , sites that use the secure protocol HTTPS can also experience duplicate content in the index...
This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review ( Part 1 ), then took an initial look at page-level issues ( Part 2 ), followed by a discussion of site-wide issues ( Part 3 ), that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site review. Using HTTP redirects When you remove, rename, or relocate a previously published webpage on your web server, do you implement an HTTP redirect on your server to help users find the content they are looking for? If not, you should. Otherwise,...
The wait is over (almost!). After gathering much appreciated feedback from our valued customers over the past year, the Bing Webmaster team held a session today at SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle where we showed a preview of the next version of Bing Webmaster Tools, our no-cost toolset for webmasters and search engine optimizers (SEOs). Bing Webmaster Tools were rebuilt from the ground up to offer more data, including a new user interface and enhanced charting functionality. If you weren't at SMX Advanced today, no worries. You'll get your own opportunity to see the new tools in action yourself in the very near future. What has changed? Actually, a better question is "what didn't change?"...
Let's continue our run-down of issues to consider in a site review. In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the whats and whys for doing a site review, and covered baselining pre-optimized performance and gathering tools. Part 2 covered important but often overlooked on-page issues that, if not properly addressed, can prove detrimental to a site's performance, both for search engine ranking as well as for usability and discoverability for users. In this post, let's examine site review issues that are more site-wide in scope. What is the meaning of this (file name)? Look at your URLs - what do they say about the page's content? Do you use human-friendly page file names or globally unique identifier...
In this blog, we've previously discussed matters relating to custom 404 pages in Fixing 404 File Not Found frustrations (SEM 101) , returning the correct HTTP status code with your custom 404 pages in 301 to 404 gets 200 - oops! (From the Forums) , and using Bing toolkits to develop such pages in Create custom 404 error webpages for IIS . Earlier this week we announced one of the results of our recent collaboration with Cal Evans, PHP guru , in our post Announcing the Bing Search Library for PHP . Well, there's more to announce. The Bing Developer Center blog today announced that we have worked with Cal to distribute a new plug-in for WordPress webmasters, which offers a new way to handle dead...
I have a quick announcement today. The Bing Developer Center team today published a new blog post that announced the availability of the new Bing Search Library for PHP , created by PHP guru Cal Evans . The new tool is available under an open source BSD license. The Bing Search Library for PHP provides a simple way to submit queries to and retrieve results from the Bing Engine. The tool comes with a tutorial that includes sample code for PHP developers . Check it out! Be back soon... -- Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center
