Bing Webmaster Tools gains new IndexNow Insights & top SEO insights report

Microsoft updated Bing Webmaster Tools with new helpful insights and reports to help you with your site performance within Bing and Search in general. Bing Webmaster Tools has a new IndexNow Insights report that shows you more than just the URLs submitted to IndexNow. Bing also added a new top SEO insights report that shows you your top SEO issues.

Fabrice Canel, the Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, announced this today at PubCon and published the news on the Bing blog. IndexNow has reached 2.5 billion URLs submitted, up from 1.2 billion from six months ago. Also, IndexNow accounts for 17% of new URLs clicked in web search results Canel added.

IndexNow Insights reporting

The new IndexNow Insights provides you “with actionable insights on IndexNow submitted URLs to boost their visibility and rankings,” Fabrice Canel wrote. The report gives you both top-level metrics and detailed reports. The original report showed the URLs submitted in the past 24 hours. The new report shows the URLs count with trends and more actionable insights. The report also shows the URLs that were not discovered using IndexNow but rather through crawling or other means.

Here is a screenshot of the report:

New IndexNow report: Here are the features now available in version two of this report:

• Learn about issues with crawled URLs and the status of your submitted URLs.
• Receive detailed reports on the number of URLs submitted, crawled, and indexed.
• Learn about your latest 1,000 submitted URLs, including their;
  • index status
  • first indexed date
  • and whether they were submitted late.
• Get insights into the source of your URL submissions, whether through Cloudflare, WordPress, manual submission, or other means.
• The “Important URLs Missing” tab shows you which newly discovered links are getting clicked but were not recently visible in IndexNow.
• Detailed information on individual errors, including content quality, robots disallowed, not crawled, indexed, and deadlinks.
• Drill down for further details on non-indexed URLs, sample URLs, submission times, and mitigation steps to getting URLs indexed.
• You can also export indexing trends for further analysis or reporting.

Top SEO Insights report

A new list of issues and insights now appear at the top of the Bing Webmaster Tools screen named Top Insights. This shows you a curated and prioritized list of the top SEO issues that Bing found for your website.

“Top Insights introduces a suite of personalized and prioritized recommendations enabling webmasters to identify and focus on the most impactful tasks for website optimization,” Microsoft wrote. Top Insights will show you content quality issues, how to improve indexing coverage, help you track progress and impact, or optimizing structured data and backlinks.

Here is a sample from my site:

Here is a screenshot of a drill down report with more details:

New Bing Webmaster Tools navigation

Microsoft also updated its Bing Webmaster Tools navigation, which removed the SEO section and just lists out those items in the main section. Plus there were some other minor navigation tweaks, like if you don’t use Bing URL submission, that won’t show in the navigation.

Here is the new navigation bar:

Why we care

If you have not yet adopted IndexNow, you probably should investigate what it would take to make it work for your website. If you are using Cloudflare, then all you need to do is toggle on a switch, plus many CMS platforms support IndexNow out of the box.

Plus, make sure to check out the new tools within Bing Webmaster Tools.

What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for websites owners to instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results. The co-sharing of IndexNow went fully live last month in January 2022.

How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:

1. Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
2. Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
3. Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.

Submit one URL is easy as sending a simple HTTP request containing the URL changed and your key.
https://www.bing.com/IndexNow?url=url-changed&key=your-key and the same would work by using https://yandex.com/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key

You can see more details instructions at the Microsoft Bing IndexNow site or the IndexNow protocol web site.