Bing revamps Site Explorer in new Bing Webmaster Tools

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us, “This is a complete new experience, cleaner and far easier to use and complete new system to support this tool.”

“We now deliver a lightning-fast experience, including on super large sites, and more actionable experience helping SEOs investigate quickly their sites,” he added.

What the new Site Explorer looks like. Here is a screen shot of the new tool:

What Site Explorer shows you. Bing Site Explorer shows you how Microsoft Bing sees your site. It will show you how most URLs Bing has seen on the web while indexing. This includes redirects, broken links, URLs blocked by robots.txt.

Bing organizes all this information “in a file explorer-like fashion,” Microsoft said. This lets you break down your view in a navigation folder like interface, so you can understand and debug your site based on your site’s own internal structure.

You are able to see clicks, impressions, backlink counts and more. You can also request indexing within the tool and test any URL with its robots.txt tester tool.

1. Indexed – Number of URLs which have been successfully indexed inside that folder.
2. Error – Critical crawl errors which have led to not indexing of URLs.
3. Warning – These may include URLs with guidelines issues, temporary crawl issues or robots.txt disallowed, etc. Webmasters should periodically check for an increase/decrease in these numbers.
4. Excluded – URLs with spam violations, low rank etc.

Why we care. SEOs and webmasters should care how search engines crawl, index and categorize their web sites. This tool gives SEOs information on how Microsoft Bing does just that and then gives you more data on clicks, impressions, links, errors, warnings, indexing issues and much more.