If you login to Bing Webmaster Tools you may notice a large change. The whole thing has been totally redone!
The Bing Webmaster Blog currently has no mention of it yet. There is a single person in the Bing Forums who noticed it, and so did @suzukik on Twitter.
The three most noticeable changes that you see right away include:
- Microsot Silverlight is required to see any real data in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- The reports look much slicker and controllable if you have Silverlight installed.
- NO BACKLINK DATA, they removed the linkage reports completely.
I won't install Silverlight on my main machine, so there is no way I will personally be using this every day. Even more so, how can they remove the back link data? Maybe Yahoo Site Explorer will be replacing it? I hope so because right now, Bing is offering nothing.
Here are screen shots of the reports:
Home without Silverlight installed:
Overview without Silverlight installed:
Overview:
Dashboard:
Crawl Stats:
Index Stats:
Traffic Stats with Query Data:
Bing wrote a message to everyone who logs into Webmaster Tools, it reads:
Welcome to the new Bing Webmaster Tools. The site has been redesigned to be easier to use, with an intuitive design organized around three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and rich charting functionality, provide a comprehensive view into how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. We’ll continue to add to the Bing Webmaster Tools as we develop new features that empower you to make more informed decisions about your sites but we encourage you to send us your feedback, suggestions and questions to help determine how the site evolves. Check the Bing Webmaster Blog to stay updated on new features and developments.Find answers to most of your questions in the help section, which includes links to a Getting Started guide and additional guides on topics such as: site ownership verification, Sitemaps, and the Bing index. If you still have questions, the Bing Webmaster Forums is a great resource for additional support.
Overall, I love the new look of the reports and how fluid they are. But like I said, two main killers for me. First is Silverlight and the second is no back link data.
Forum discussion at Bing Forums.
Update: At 9am (EST), Bing posted their blog post on this at the Bing Webmaster Blog.
