In 2010, Yahoo announced that its organic search results would be powered by Bing which led to many Yahoo properties being discontinued. So, as expected, on November 21st, Yahoo officially took down its free, search analysis tool, “Site Explorer”. What does this mean for Webmasters? Even though the data has been integrated into Bing Webmaster Tools, it seems evident that any type of robust (and free) online tool for checking things like backlinks is gone forever. There are, of course, a plethora of third party tools, but those tools are compiling an aggregate of a multitude of different platforms, and are not a true reflection of the “true” backlink data that a specific search engine has.

Bing Webmaster Tools has made some effective improvements over the last several months and the verified webmaster for a website will now be able to get even more comprehensive data. Bing Webmaster Tools will likely show an increased number of backlinks being reported for a website, as well as provide a central location for both Yahoo and Bing data.

However, many SEO’ers, including myself, will miss the practicality of the old Site Explorer. Site Explorer was the only free, public database from a major search engine that gave you an easy way to look at the amounts of backlinks to a specific page. While privacy was a concern, making certain information public inspired other webmasters to improve their own inbound link building techniques as well as making it easy for the more novice webmaster to take a quick glance at a competitor’s website for inbound link ideas, thus inspiring innovation in the world of SEO.

In a previous post, Google versus Bing: Webmaster Tools, I discussed the virtues of both Google and Bing’s webmaster tools websites. Today, I will give an overview of Bing’s main categories and how they can be used to improve the functionality, both for SEO and for the user, of your website:

Dashboard
Overview page, much like the Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools, that gives you a “snapshot” of the most pertinent data for your site, such as recent trends pertaining to crawling, indexing and traffic. Newly added sites begin showing data within 3 days of gaining access.

Crawl
With this section, you can view six months of crawl data like the amount of pages crawled and crawl errors. This is a really useful place to identify any potential problems with the Bingbot accessing pages on your site to include in its index.

Index
See which of your site’s pages are in the Bing index. You can also view your inbound link data here, too.

Traffic
What kind of traffic is being driven to your site? This section provides six months of traffic data and analyzes search query performance over time.

New Features:
Index Explorer (Index Tracker)

One really helpful new addition is the ability to locate any “broken” pages on the site; 404 (removed), 500’s (server errors):

What makes this new tool even more useful is the ability to “filter” your results and actually display the errors on your site manually, page by page. You are even able to locate directories on your site that have been infected with Malware.

Crawl Delay Function
There is also a new crawl delay function which allows you to ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours and crawl faster during off-peak hours, allowing for better load times on pages from your site.

Crawl Parameters for AJAX
Lastly, you can even set crawl parameters for AJAX websites (sites that use Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for dynamic data). Search engines have always found most kinds of JavaScript problematic, but with this new function, you can be certain Bing can crawl, index and rank AJAX pages on your site.
 

A common SEO question seems to be, “How do I optimize for both Bing and Google local search?” The simple answer is that by following certain “Best Practices” for search engine optimization and doing your due diligence with things like effective keyword research and applying proper link building etc, you should get the desired results from both search engines.

There are also some nifty tools out there which let you view search results “side by side”: http://www.bingle.nu. For instance, a search for “car parts” returns these results from both search engines:

Both Bing and Google return many localized results via “Google Places” for Google:

and the Bing Business Portal for Bing:

Google places (formerly Google Local Business Center) is where you can tell Google directly about your business. Bing offers the same service: http://www.bing.com/businessportal/. Of course, for both engines, it is still wise to ensure that you have included localized onsite content like your address and related keywords, included your address and keywords listed in local directories, reviews of your business and maybe localized keyword elements in the domain name.
 
For a business with multiple locations or, for instance, law firms or banks with multiple branches, create separate pages for each on the site and include the address and any pertinent contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses. Obviously, ensure that each store or branch is easily found via navigation and/or an HTML sitemap page.