Bing migrates Submit URL, Block URL and Crawl Control to the new Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools’ Submit URL, Block URL and Crawl Control features have been migrated to the new Bing Webmaster portal, the company announced Tuesday at SMX London. Users will be able to use the current and new pages simultaneously for a brief period before Bing deprecates the current pages in a few weeks.

Why we care

Bing’s new toolset is designed to provide a cleaner, faster, more responsive experience for webmasters and SEOs. The newly migrated tools are useful for controlling how Bing crawls and indexes content. These improvements may encourage more usage and increase adoption.

More on the news

• The Submit URL tool allows webmasters to submit pages directly to Bing for real-time indexing.
• The Block URL tool allows webmasters to temporarily disable a URL from appearing in Bing search results. It can also be used to clear Bing’s cache for a given URL, in case the page has been updated recently.
• The Crawl Control tool can be used to regulate the hourly crawl rate.
• Bing Webmaster Tools will be fully revamped by July, Fabrice Canel, principal program manager at Bing, said at SMX London.
• The new Bing Webmaster Tools was first announced in February at SMX West, launching with refreshed versions of its Search Performance report, Sitemaps and Backlinks tools.