TECHNICAL · SEO GLOSSARY
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is Microsoft\'s free platform for monitoring how the Bing search engine crawls, indexes, and ranks your website. It provides site performance data, URL inspection, sitemap submission, crawl diagnostics, and backlink reporting for Bing and Yahoo search.
Definition
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is the Bing equivalent of Google Search Console. It provides: **Performance reports**: impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position for queries and pages in Bing SERPs — segmented by device, country, and time range. **URL Inspection**: check if a specific URL is indexed by Bing, view the crawled HTML, and trigger an indexing request. **Sitemap submission**: submit sitemap.xml files so Bing knows which pages exist and can prioritise crawling. **Crawl diagnostics**: identify pages blocked by robots.txt, pages with HTTP errors (404, 5xx), and crawl anomalies from Bingbot. **Backlink data**: Bing\'s own backlink database showing which external pages link to your site — a different data source from Ahrefs, Majestic, and Google\'s link data. **SEO analyser**: a built-in on-page analysis tool for individual pages (title tag, meta description, heading structure, broken links). **Keyword research**: Bing\'s keyword research tool showing search volume estimates for Bing queries. **IndexNow integration**: BWT supports the IndexNow protocol (also supported by Yandex) — submitting a URL to IndexNow notifies all participating search engines simultaneously without separate API calls for each. **Site Explorer**: visual representation of site link structure from Bing\'s crawled data. Verification options: XML meta tag, HTML file placement, or DNS TXT record — same three methods as GSC.
Why it matters for SEO
While Google dominates global search, Bing holds approximately 3–6% market share (higher in specific demographics — older users, US desktop users, Microsoft Edge default). For sites where Bing traffic is significant (many B2B SaaS and enterprise audiences skew Windows/Edge), BWT data is valuable for diagnosing Bing-specific indexing issues, which may differ from Google. Additionally, Bing\'s results feed Yahoo and DuckDuckGo (via Yahoo), so Bing indexing issues affect a broader set of search engines. BWT is free and provides data GSC does not — especially Bing\'s own backlink database, which can surface link patterns not in other tools.
How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this
The audit focuses on the technical signals that affect both Google and Bing crawlability: robots.txt configuration (Bingbot respects the same standard robots.txt directives as Googlebot), sitemap presence and validity, canonical tag correctness, HTTP status codes, and page accessibility. Bing-specific crawl data requires direct BWT access, but technical issues identified by the audit typically affect Bing indexability in the same way they affect Google.
Useful tools and resources
GLOSSARY
Related terms
technical
Google Search Console
Google\'s free tool for monitoring how your site appears in Google Search — showing impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, index coverage, and crawl errors.
Read definition →technical
Robots.txt
A text file at the root of a domain that tells crawlers which pages or sections to access or avoid.
Read definition →technical
Crawlability
Whether search engine crawlers can successfully access, fetch, and parse a page — the prerequisite for indexing and ranking.
Read definition →See how your site scores on Bing Webmaster Tools.
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