Bing Webmaster Tools, which were often reported to be slow and outdated, just got a serious upgrade. The new and improved Bing Webmaster Tools portal, which was earlier released to a select group of users, was set to be made accessible to all users by the first week of March 2020.
The idea behind this new development
According to Bing’s blog post, the backend datastore has been updated to improve data extraction and the user experience has been redesigned in an effort to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. Moreover, it states that the portal’s responsive design offers users the flexibility to access it across devices.
In their words, “The refreshed portal is being built with key principles of keeping the design Cleaner and Responsive with Faster and more Accessible tools.”
Key features of the upgraded webmaster tools portal
The new portal is said to have 3 key features:
- Backlinks – The new Backlinks report that features in the refreshed portal is the Inbound Links report integrated with the Disavow links tool.
- Search Performance – Page Traffic and Search Keywords reports have integrated to become the new Search Performance report.
Sitemaps – The new Sitemaps page is the refreshed version of the previous Sitemaps page.
Final Takeaway
Now would be the best time to get familiar with the new portal. It is being said that it will only be a few weeks before they start deprecating the functionality from the old portal. Users that use webmaster APIs to get data programmatically, can continue doing so as the Webmaster APIs will remain as-is.
Bing invites users to leave their feedback on Twitter and Facebook, and raise a service ticket with their support team is they encounter any issues with the new portal.