Below is live coverage of the Bing Toolbox: Your One-Stop Shop for Better ROI from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Keri Morgret of Strike Models.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Bing Toolbox: Your One-Stop Shop for Better ROI | (08/12/2009) |
| 10:43 | Keri Morgret: What's an engine without the tools to help drive better engagement? Welcome to Bing Toolbox. Toolbox is designed to build community and provide all of the content and tools webmasters, developers, and advertisers need to enhance their sites, understand the impact of Bing's new features, and get the most out of using the Bing API, and more.
In this workshop, Bing Team will take you through the various tools offered to help you get the most from Bing, including how to:
- Submit URLs to be indexed by Bing
- Submit your sitemap
- Gain access to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Request an API key
The site is new and we're just getting started. To close out, we'll open up to the audience for Q&A and feedback to help us build the tools you want.
Speakers:
Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing
Alessandro Catorcini, Senior Program Manager, Bing
Ganesh Sankarakumar, Senior Test Manager, Bing |
| 10:46 | Keri Morgret: We're waiting for pepole to filter in before the session starts.
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| 10:47 | Keri Morgret: Rajesh is introducing the session. The group will be talking about how best to use the toolbox to better your ROI for bing. |
| 10:48 | Keri Morgret: Today search has become an integral part of our life. We connect to devices, other human beings through search. |
| 10:49 | Keri Morgret: What is Bing's strategy? Their goals:
Deliver Great Results
A richer, more organized experience
Helps you accomplish key tasks more easily. |
| 10:50 | Keri Morgret: Sometimes the results just don't make sense. They're looking at organizing the results and putting them in groupings. |
| 10:51 | Keri Morgret: Bing wants to help empower the users to make more informed decisions and help you get informed in the decision process. |
| 10:51 | Keri Morgret: Bing Toolbox gives you all of the interfaces to connect you to the Bing engineering team. |
| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: Lots of tools shown on this screenshot. He mentions that you can connect with other people in the bing community. They're goingt to show us a sneak peek at some things to come. |
| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: Toolbox is role/function driven. They have sections for develoopers, webmasters, advertising, community, and support. |
| 10:53 | Keri Morgret: Why do they have this toolbox? It's because it's all about you (site owner/developer/etc.) |
| 10:54 | Keri Morgret: Want to help increase engagement, generate traffic, drive insight, boost productivity. |
| 10:55 | Keri Morgret: Currently in the toolbox:
For Webmasters:
Submit a sitemap
manage your sites
run their SEO tool
get keyword analysis
detect malways
go to the forums
Developers:
Use our apps
View the galleries
Download SDKs
Sign up to use the free API
Connect with others |
| 10:56 | Keri Morgret: SEO Toolkit: a clean web finally!
Some of the questions partners ask Bing:
Are the content and structure of my site optimized for search engines?
Web is always changing - how do I ensure that all external links on my site are valid?
If I change something on my site - what will it break?
Are all pages on my site easily discoverable?
Do all pages on my site load correctly?
Is robots.txt too restrictive or too permissive?
Is the sitemap.xml up to date? |
| 10:56 | [Comment From lakkineni]
Is this available to public? |
| 10:57 | Keri Morgret: Toolkit runs on IIS 7. Thousands of downoloads, Beta1 released in June '09. |
| 10:57 | Keri Morgret: Their goal is to help webmasters and site developers to get a good site ready BEFORE they publish, rather than find problems after it's published. |
| 10:57 | Keri Morgret: Bing API 2.0. |
| 10:58 | Keri Morgret: API is to help you get the data out of Bing.
Easy integration with OpenSearch, SOAP, XML, JSON, and RSS formats
Monetization with search ads from adCenter Publisher
Flexibility in ranking and visualizing web results
Unmetered usage for web sites and applications |
| 10:58 | Keri Morgret: [hi mom! there will be a quiz on this next time we talk - KM] |
| 10:59 | Keri Morgret: For the unmetered use, don't do anything illegal, spamming, bots -- comply to terms of service and you can use it as much as you want. |
| 10:59 | Keri Morgret: You can get all kinds of things from this. |
| 10:59 | Keri Morgret: A demo is up now. |
| 11:01 | Keri Morgret: You can get a free AppID. |
| 11:02 | Keri Morgret: Lots of people in their community. People building code snippets, and mroe. |
| 11:02 | Keri Morgret: You do need to authenticate with passport. |
| 11:02 | Keri Morgret: They will communicate with webmasters through email. |
| 11:03 | Keri Morgret: Reports for webmasters:
Indexing, how many pages are indexed, are their crawl issues, how many 404s do you have. You can filter the 404s by a subfolder or subdomain, and you can download in a csv format. |
| 11:04 | Keri Morgret: Other issue types: blocked by REP, long dynamic URL, malware infected, unsupported content type. |
| 11:04 | Keri Morgret: Backlinks is another report that is available. Emphasizing again that Bing's goal is to empower their partners, give them enough ways to manage their content at Bing, and give them data insights. |
| 11:04 | Keri Morgret: API talk up next. |
| 11:05 | Keri Morgret: He's showing us how to get an AppID. |
| 11:06 | Keri Morgret: The ID is active at all of their data centers within about 10 minutes. |
| 11:07 | Keri Morgret: You can monitor the number of queries to Bing from your website. "Traffic is measured across a fixed, 24 hour period that resets at 12 mdnight GMT." |
| 11:07 | Keri Morgret: Libraries for ruby, php, python have been built by the community |
| 11:07 | Keri Morgret: Last week they released a silverlight api. |
| 11:08 | Keri Morgret: You can query for web results, news, images, videos. Represent the results in rich ways. Multi-axis presentation of results. Looks interesting. |
| 11:09 | Keri Morgret: They're talking about doing stuff for the iPhone and other things that is way over my head. |
| 11:10 | Keri Morgret: Wrapping images and other things. Doing stuff with 100-300 lines of code. |
| 11:10 | Keri Morgret: A couple of laughs as the Microsoft rep mentions that he's not used to a Mac UI (he's using a Mac for this presentation). |
| 11:11 | Keri Morgret: Opening things up for Q&A now. |
| 11:12 | Keri Morgret: Question is about application name. |
| 11:14 | Keri Morgret: Next question: do you provide information about where an incoming 404 is from, and you can download this. |
| 11:15 | Keri Morgret: Next question: person finding indexing is shallow of their site compared to Google, even though they've submitted site maps.
Panelist will get info from person to investigate more, there are several areas of possible problems. |
| 11:16 | Keri Morgret: They've created a white paper for webmasters. |
| 11:17 | Keri Morgret: Data about broken links and other problem is real-time based on Bing's index/cache. They do tell the webmaster when their last crawl was. |
| 11:18 | Keri Morgret: Also, you can use the tooklit (linked from the toolbox) to do a live crawl on your site (internally) to find problems. |
| 11:20 | Keri Morgret: If you had an MSN webmaster account, that information is ported, you don't need to get a new account. |
| 11:21 | Keri Morgret: This will not run on a Mac. |
| 11:23 | Keri Morgret: Emphasizing you do need II7 for this to work. |
| 11:25 | Keri Morgret: If you're using the API for search results, there are restrictions about what advertising you can display next to the results (I think it's just Microsoft, but didn't get exact details -- just make a note to look at the standard terms of use). |
| 11:26 | Keri Morgret: Question about how this might affect the BOSS community from Yahoo. It's too soon to make any statement about what might happen. |
| 11:27 | Keri Morgret: Question about roadmap for next 6-12 month. They want to make the API more feature-rich, increase instant answers they can expose. |
| 11:29 | Keri Morgret: Question about why such a huge increase in Bing traffic to this site as opposed to what he got from MSN/Live. Again, Bing reps will need to look into it. Reps did say that some of it is because of advertising blitz and people using Bing. |
| 11:30 | Keri Morgret: Sports information will be available soon from the API. |
| 11:35 | Keri Morgret: user having problems with having video crawled, I believe they're from discovery channel.
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| 11:35 | Keri Morgret: panelist says they should talk offline. There is an option for premium customers to have feed. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: Question about accuracy of link information. They are displaying data from their index, in some cases estimates. |
| 11:39 | Keri Morgret: Asking if there are plans to make the search marketing API free. Clarified that it's the ad API he's asking about. Will talk offline. |
| 11:40 | Keri Morgret: Ross Dunn asking if there's an easy way to let a webmaster know that they're violating guidelines. The toolkit is good here because it will show you errors in advance, but they didn't quite answer the question. |
| 11:40 | Keri Morgret: They will do a blog that will talk about any common errors they're seeing across sites. |
| 11:42 | Keri Morgret: Ross comments that you can't run the toolkit if you have XP or server 2003. |
| 11:43 | Keri Morgret: Q&A is over. You can talk to the panelists at the Bing booth. |
| 11:43 | 
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