In this second Bing Webmaster Tools post in our series on Webmaster Tools, the focus is on reporting. We’ll be going over a number of pages, and try to explain what information is available and how this can help you improve your website. Or get new insights about your audience, of course. This section is called: Reports and Data.
Note that although we very much like the ‘broader’ setup of Bing Webmaster Tools, I personally tend to use Google Webmaster Tools first for one simple reason. Google dominates the search engine market. There is data from much more users in Google Webmaster Tools. Having said that, there are a lot of things in Bing Webmaster Tools that could be used to further improve Google Webmaster Tools. Now let’s go over the different chapters in this section of Bing Webmaster Tools.
Site activity
As you can see in the graph below (upper right corner), Bing Webmaster Tools combines data from Yahoo! and Bing for these stats. It also painfully highlights the difference in use of the webmaster tools: as you can see, our website gets around 80 clicks a day from Bing and Yahoo!, compared to about 9,000 clicks on average per day from Google.
In the chart, you can also choose to show a number of other things:
- Clicks from Search
- Appeared in Search
- Pages Crawled
- Crawl Errors
- Total Pages indexed
It’s nice to align the number of pages crawled and the crawl errors, but as with most graphs like this, it’s the trend that matter the most to me here. If all of a sudden the graph flatlines at zero (except at the crawl errors), there must be something wrong.
Page Traffic
Let’s start with the main table here:
There is a lot going on here, right? All the arrows and numbers tell you what happened with for instance the Clicks from Search, and how often you appeared in search. For your convenience, Bing has divided the clicks by the appearances, giving you the click-through rate (CTR).
The average search click position tells you the position your result was when clicked, on average. The trend is key here. If the average position gets closer to #1, you know you are doing well, as your page is increasing it’s ranking for ‘that’ search term. This highlights the main issue: you need to combine this with the Search Keywords in the last column to be useful. Just click View, as Bing Webmaster Tools presents these keywords in a convenient popup:
Who’s ‘youst’, right? I can’t get used to that downwards pointing arrow with a number, it’s like we dropped 675 clicks. But that’s not what is meant. We had 675 clicks from Bing search result pages to our homepage where the search keyword was ‘yoast’, and that is a drop from the beginning of the selected time period.
This is also where you can check the performance per position in the search result pages. Just click the ‘+’ in front of the keyword:
Back to the main table for your Page Traffic. The last column we haven’t mentioned yet is Average Search Appearance Position. In most if not all cases, this number is higher than the average click position, simply because we all know the higher the position, the more clicks.
Index Explorer
This is your Mac Finder or Windows Explorer for all things Bing found in your website or site’s structure. It’s how Bing sees your site. You can see files Bing considers 301 Redirects or 404 Error pages, for instance. There are a number of filters here, listed as the blue links below. Next to that, you can use some custom options:
Strange thing is that our robots.txt is actually updated a while ago already. Where Google tends to find these updates within a day, sometimes hour, Bing still shows some old content in here. We re-fetched the robots.txt during the writing of this article, just to make sure. The fetch shows the current content of our robots.txt. I’m sure Bing Webmaster Tools will find that eventually.
Search Keywords
Much like the Page Traffic table, this table shows you the number of clicks from search results in Bing, as well as all other things explained there. It are keywords instead of URLs in this table, but that is the main difference.
As you can see, that last column is different. You can view the pages instead of keywords (at Page Traffic). So it’s basically the same table, but the other way around :) Use to your preference, so to speak.
SEO Reports
Why order a site review when you have Bing SEO Reports. [promo] Well, for one thing, we tell you much more about stuff from speed to design, from content to social. [/promo] Bing SEO Reports in beta, but does provide some nice insights. We need to work on our meta descriptions, according to this overview:
I especially like the fact that Bing tells you how they consider these suggestions to influence your SEO. Bing agrees with Google that meta descriptions are like invites to your website that should have a clear message about the contents of the page and tells that the severity of these meta descriptions is high. The fact that the meta description is missing, isn’t bad* per se, but it’s good to know where these are missing. You can easily click the suggestion title to find the pages these should be added.
Bing Webmaster Tools has taken the time to add a proper explanation to all these suggestions:
If you click one of the (50, it’s limited to that) links on that Detail page, you’ll be taken to a SEO Analyzer (also in beta). More on that SEO Analyzer in our next post on Bing Webmaster Tools.
It seems our knowledge base – we’re using HelpScout’s awesome Docs – is missing meta language information. I can imagine that being so due to their global user base. In that case it’s a good thing language isn’t templated.
All in all, this is a very useful section you can use for some basic SEO check of your website.
* in case you can’t come up with a proper meta description, let Bing (or Google) decide. Both will create a meta description that in most cases is constructed from a text snippet containing the keyword used in search. This can be beneficial for conversion, as you will understand.
Inbound Links
Again, the details make this a useful section. On the dashboard page of this section, the total number of inbound links (links to your website), doesn’t say much, unless there is a break in the trend. Right below the graph, you’ll find target pages. Clicking one of these gives you an overview of the pages linking your specific page:
As you can see, this includes the anchor text. There are up to 20,000 external pages listed. As the popup isn’t suitable for that number of links, the export option in the upper right of the popup comes in really handy for further analysis. Bing Webmaster Tools offers that export option on almost all pages, by the way.
Crawl Information
This is a quick overview of error codes (like 404, 502), Redirects (301, 302), DNS failures, connection timeouts and robots.txt exclusions. All is grouped per category:
Click the row marked with * in Bing Webmaster Tools to find all URLs that resulted in that error, are redirected, etc. It’s nice to see if all pages you have excluded are indeed excluded, for instance. Clicking a link in this table isn’t providing more information, but gets you to the page at hand to check f.i. if the error or redirect still exists. As mentioned right above the table, Bing refers you to the Index Explorer for more details. It would be nice if I could mark a 404 as fixed here, by the way (in case any of the Bing people reads this).
Malware
Score.
In case Bing detects any malware on your website, it will list the URLs of potentially infected pages here.
Malware (short for malicious software) is “any software used to disrupt computer operation, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems.” (Wikipedia). Of course you don’t want that on your website.
In the unwanted case you have some URLs listed here, fix the malware or have our friends at Sucuri clean this up, and Request a Review via this same section in Bing Webmaster Tools.
That concludes this section in Bing Webmaster Tools
To round things up, the Reports & Data section in Bing Webmaster Tools gives you a lot to work with. Be sure to add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and check this section to learn more about what can be improved for your website.
If you have any additions or remarks, these are more than welcome. If you are an absolute Bing adept, please let us know what hidden gems you have found in the Reports & Data section in Bing Webmaster Tools!
This post first appeared as Bing Webmaster Tools: Reports and Data on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!