Bing announced several updates to its Webmaster Tools platform. The name of the update is Honey Badger to those playing along at home (more on that below). Let's look at some of the new features and why they will prove important to successful SEO at Bing (and perhaps even Yahoo!).
- Webmasters can now ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours or crawl faster during off-peak hours. This configurable crawl delay is a unique and interesting feature for those concerned with site performance.
- Bing has also rewritten its Index Tracker (the area most SEOs will spend time). The backend has been repurposed to showcase freshness and performance. The best part? New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they sign up.
- Finally, Bing has finally added user/role management. Site owners can grant administrative privileges (read/write, or read-only access) to others users, and even grant certain users access to subdomains or subfolders.
Kudos to Bing on the moniker of this update to BWT being Honey Badger. The honey badger or ratel is a tenacious small carnivore that has a reputation for being, pound for pound, Africa's most fearless animal despite its small size. It is even listed as the "most fearless animal in the world" in the 2002 Guinness Book of Records.
When your prey is Google, you'll need to be as fearless as a honey badger.
Sample of the configurable crawl delay within Bing Webmaster Tools: