Bing Webmaster Tools Updated

November 4th Bing implemented their latest round of updates to their Webmaster Tools Service the latest since their Honey Badger Update back in June. New features include the following major changes.

Enhanced Crawl Details

The Crawl Details tab now displays inbound link counts regardless of the server response code. They've also added details on URLs that contain Malware and Robots.txt restricted URLs. This is a welcome improvement over the previous report which only showed code level 400 responses. Now you can also see 301 & 302 redirects, and they are broken out separately (Thank you Bing!).

Sadly, Bing missed the boat on providing a very handy bit of information. For example, the report for code 404 shows what broken links it found on your site and how many inbound links it found to that 404 URL. However, it only shows you where the inbound links are to those 404 pages if the links are off site. So, for now you'll either have to dig this information out of your server log or run a link checker bot on your site such as Xenu.

What we do want to give them a hand for is showing you up to 20,000 OFF-SITE inbound links to your 404 returning pages. This gives you the opportunity to contact those sites and request they update their links, or alternatively you can add a 301 redirect on your site to an updated URL.

Very Important - The Excluded by Robots.txt report will show inbound links to URLs on your site that BingBot is restricted from crawling.

This means it's wasted link juice as links don't transfer Page Rank if they are restricted from Crawling. While you may