Five awesome features and options in Bing’s ‘phoenixed’ webmaster tools and how they compare to Google Webmaster Tools.
#1 – Link Explorer
This tool allows you to slice and dice your link profile much like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO do. For example, you can specify anchor text and find all domains linking to you with that keyword. This can be particularly useful when trying to maintain a clean link profile or auditing a penalised website. The tool also allows yo to specify additional query, scope (domain or URL), source (internal, external and all) and you can filter results by specific site too. Google doesn’t have a tool like this and so far we had to export and play around with data on our own, though the lack of connection between anchor text and linking pages made that exercise more or less pointless.
The results are not clickable, but you can export them as a two column spreadsheet (Source URL | Title):
#2 – Six Months of Traffic Data
Six months of data including rankings, clicks, impressions, crawling, indexation and caching. Google only offers 3 months and without change factors on date ranges above 30 days.
#3 – Separation Between Impressions & Clicks
In Google Webmaster Tools your search impressions always flatten the clicks making the graph useless. Bing does this too, but you have the option to switch things on and off on the side.
By switching impressions off, the graph gains its shape and suddenly becomes very useful:
#4 – Link Acquisition Graph
In the graph below you see six months worth of link data with decent resolution. This feature would be much more useful with a domain only filter. This is something Majestic does well, so it would be interesting to see how it compares. I am not expecting Google ever to release a tool to match this.
#5 – Granular Keyword Performance
Two ways to drill through your data, by URL or by keyword. This is not that different from Google Webmaster Tools but it does go into extra detail.
By clicking on one keyword you see its positions, clicks, impressions and CTRs on a granular level.
BONUS FEATURE
This is totally new and awesome. An alternative way to browse through your data, using folder-like approach.
From what I’ve seen so far it has a lot of bugs and poor UX. On signing up I’ve had to enter information twice and been unable to continue due to errors.
I like the index explorer as well, provides a convenient way to browse/drill into your content. Of course for all of the sites that that don’t categorise their content and use root level URLs – not quite so handy!