Bing Webmaster Tools – A Novice’s First Impression

I’m relatively new to the SEO world, but I’m interested/excited to see what kind of competition Bing can bring to Google’s search dominance.  GOOG is no longer the cool, independent startup that we all loved a few years back, it’s now a cool, 800 lb gorilla.  At least maybe MSFT can add a 2nd gorilla to the mix and give us a little bit of variety.

I registered for Bing Webmaster Tools to see what kind of new ideas/statistics that it could provide for our business.  So far, there are a few good tools and a lot of questions.

The basic categories:

Summary – This tells you the number of pages Bing has indexed, the status of the site, last crawl date, and your top 5 pages.  There are two of the most interesting Bing features here:  Domain Score, and Page Score.  These are all ranked in a 0/5 to 5/5 system.  What’s the analysis behind it?  How is it measured?  Who knows?  I haven’t found anyone on the forums who knows yet, either.  It’s about as undefined as Google’s PageRank.

Profile – This is where you can update your contact info, get your verification code for Bing (header meta tag), upload a Sitemap, etc.

Crawl Issues – This has some great tools to search your site for unwanted content.  Search based on broken links, malware-infected, unsupported content, long dynamic URLs, etc.  It’s basically a good way to see how much garbage is mixed in with your site, from the Search Engine’s point of view.   Great feature.

Backlinks – This is much like Yahoo’s Site Explorer.  It’s a nice tool to see who’s linking to you anywhere on the web–fairly straightforward.

Outbound Links – Same thing, opposite direction.

Keywords – Theoretically, it tells you how different pages on your site perform on the Bing search engine for the keywords that you type in.  The only problem is, it’s this silly 5 out of 5 Page Score system again, so it’s not clear what the objective weighting is.

Sitemaps - Point Bing to your Sitemap’s URL.

Overall, this is a great set of tools for someone starting out to be able to analyze most of the information they need about their site’s search engine friendliness.  Visually, it’s boring, and could really use some explanation of the ranking system.  There’s no comparison to Google Analytics so far.  Considering Bing is so new, it’s a very good start to a toolset that will likely expand quite a bit over the next year.

Anyone else used these tools yet?  Thoughts/comparisons?