On February 19 at SMX West, Bing announced that it’ll release the first phase of a refreshed and improved version of Bing Webmaster Tools in the first of March. According to Bing, the new toolset will offer a faster, cleaner, more responsive and even more actionable set of features for Webmasters and SEOs.
This update will not only feature a new user interface update, but three new features:
- Backlinks: The inbound links report in the current portal has been integrated with the disavow links tool, which are now a part of the new backlinks report in the refreshed portal.
- Search Performance: Page traffic and search keywords reports are also integrated as one and are a part of the new search performance report.
- Sitemaps: The sitemaps page is the refreshed and looks new.
Bing said, “We are delighted to announce the first iteration of the refreshed Bing Webmaster Tools portal. We are releasing the new portal to a select set of users this week and will be rolling out to all users by the 1st week of March.”
In order to access the refreshed portal follow these steps:
- Sign-in to Bing Webmaster Tools and navigate to Sitemap, Inbound Links, Page Traffic or Search Keywords reports
- Click on the links to open the new portal.
- You can also access this today at aka.ms/newbwt.
There aren’t any changes to the API, which means you can “continue as-is” and obtain your data via the API as you have before.
Bing said that “over the next few months,” it will spend time moving all the functionality to the new portal. Users can still use the current and new pages simultaneously for a short period over the transition period.
Once everything has been moved over, Bing will deprecate the functionality from the old portal for a few weeks. Once it goes live, the old version won’t have much time before it goes away.