Webmaster Tools Receives More Updates

Hot on the heels of a comprehensive update to Bing's Webmaster Tools Services late in July, Bing has continued to release some updates to the service. The first of which is the option to be contacted by Bing to receive Webmaster Tools notifications.

We highly recommend allowing Bing to contact you in regards to your Web sites listed in Webmaster Tools Center, so that you can receive information should there be a problem with your site. If you haven't signed in for a while, take a minute and log into Webmaster Tools and click YES.

AJAX Changes

Bing has also changed some crawl settings for AJAX empowered sites.

This setting for AJAX sites is in the Crawl -> Crawl Settings section. The section that has been updated is the text near the checkbox for AJAX. It did say "Configure Bing for Ajax site crawling" and recently that text was updated to "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!." Bing has not updated their help files yet for details on this option, but if you have an AJAX powered site, this may provide you with more insight into what the checkbox does. We believe this was just a change to the text description, but it may signal a change in the crawling abilities for AJAX as well.

On a side note, take a look at the crawl settings in the screen shot above, we saw a marked improvement in indexed URLs on that particular site after tweaking the crawl settings to allow heavy spidering during off peak hours. Was it due to the crawl settings change? That's hard to say, but you may want to experiment with this setting to see if you have similar improvements.

Sitemaps

Bing has also added the supported sitemap filetypes allowed in addition to .xml. They now will accept RSS 2.0, Atom .3/1.0, and Text based sitemaps also.