It was with very real interest that I signed in today to the newly launched “Bing Webmaster Tools”. That interest was pretty swiftly kicked in the “proverbials” when I found that I had to install Silverlight in order to get the “full experience”.
As a good little boy I followed instructions and dutifully downloaded and installed the browser plugin. Onwards and upwards, I followed yet more instructions, adding the various sites I wanted in the webmaster tools to my account, and verifying them with the simple addition of a meta tag to my web sites’ homepage.
That however is pretty much where it stopped though. Rather shockingly, Webmaster Tools reinforced what I knew already. That the Bing index sucks and that, because I barely touch it, Microsoft and their shiny new search engine has absolutely ZERO information on the domain. How useful is that?
Worse still though the navigation, either in Silverlight or HTML didn’t work at all, and opening the site in IE 8, 7 or even 6 on my virtual machines made no difference. Way to go Bing! Perhaps next time you can do a little better before launching such a useless tool. As the old adage goes: “learn from the BIG boys”, so you might want to check out what Google is up to!
Perhaps you have had better luck. Any thoughts, impressions, reactions?
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
Paul Mackenzie Ross Jul 28, 2010
I feel exactly the same way. I already had Silverlight installed (Why, when there’s already Flash and JavaScript?) but when I got to using the tools they told me nothing I couldn’t find out from Google Webmaster Tools… and a lot less too.
Bing Webmaster Tools are less data rich than GWTs and, as I visit it each day, it appears that features are being added/removed as they go along, so it was released as a “work in progress”. #fail
What’s really frustrating is their sitemaps “feature” – I had a seperate URL yesterday for each of my sitemaps to resubmit to the Bing index as they were updated. Today those URLs error & redirect, monkeying around with my browser and I end up back at BWTs again. The only info they give me on my sitemaps is that one errored and I can resubmit and the other… was indexed 8 days again and there’s no option/button to resubmit it!
Right now Bing Webmaster Tools really is rubbish, but I’m going to stick at it until they get it right… just like Microsoft took all those years to develop Vista (refusing to listen to the needs of users along the way) and then *finally* stripped all the crud out and called it Windows 7! Surely it won’t take them *that* long to get this tool right… Will it?
I like Bing, it’s not bad at all. BWTs though are utterly useless.
Vincent Roman Jul 28, 2010
@Paul – Thanks for your comments and I totally agree. I really do wish they were better, and that Bing, Yahoo et al, all made their indexes much more accessible to web content producers who are interested in developing their sites further, by generating traffic. If nothing else that is the total appeal of Google, who show it really isn’t that hard to do this kind of thing, every time! Thanks again for the comment, and looking forward to checking out your blog :)