Bing's New Tool Tells Them When You've Made Big Changes
Bing released a new tool, with capabilities not found on any other network (ahem, Google). They recently announced the Site Move Tool, which allows you to tell Bing when something big has changed on your site. With this tool, you direct Bing to crawl your new site or new site-map to find the changes you've made.
301 Redirects are STILL NECESSARY for up to several months, but it quickens the process of getting your site crawled and indexed properly. This tool allows you to tell Bing when you move URLs from one place to another on the same site, move URLs from one site to another of your verified sites, move the root domain to a new address and even move URLs from one subdomain to another.
Tip: You can only use this tool once every 6 months so save it for a time when you do large, permanent moves. For small changes (like just moving a page or two), a permanent redirect will be fine. As stated by Bing:
"Although permanently redirecting your URLs using 301 redirects is normally enough and the new tool doesn't replace these redirects, the Site Move tool can help speed things up and get your redirects reflected in our index more quickly."
This can be a valuable asset for Bing Webmaster Tools users. While their portion of the Search Market Share is small, traffic is traffic. If you have a big change pending in your site structure or domain name, here are some resources to check out:
