Introducing the Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection Tool

Bing has just announced its Webmaster Tools URL inspection tool. To get started simply enter a URL for inspection. Their systems will crawl and inspect the page to provide various details along with appropriate messages and action items for potential page improvement. Key functionalities provided are:

• Index details – This card shows the index status and details of the URL. It includes details on each step, i.e. when and where the URL was discovered, crawled and indexed along with the option to see a HTML format and HTTP response details of the same.

• SEO details – This section provides details to webmasters on SEO based errors and warnings on their webpage. With approximately 15 SEO best practices in place, the tool provides detailed analysis of the errors and highlights the corresponding in-code HTML and steps on how to fix them. One can also find the errors highlighted on the page Bing scanned as it would appear on the web.
• MarkUp details – Checks the availability and implementation of selected structured MarkUp languages in a way which allows Bing to read the site information properly.
• Live Check – Often webmasters would like to determine if a page on their site can be crawled or not without requesting it for index. This feature caters to that and is especially useful in investigating content when their site may have been compromised and is for example sending different HTML to search engine crawlers than to users.