Contributor and Bing Chief Evangelist Christi Olson outlines the free publicity tools Bing offers in part 5 of our Bing WMT series.
In the first four parts of this series, I reviewed the free tools Bing makes available to all webmasters once you have created, logged in and verified your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
Every subsequent time you log in, you get access to meaty data and an analysis of your websites’ performance, indexing, and crawling history on Bing. However, you can also use some free publicly-available tools that don’t require you to create a Bing webmaster tools account or to verify site ownership.
With these free tools, you can submit information to Bing (but not track the submission or status) and access some diagnostic tools quickly and easily. Let’s take a look at each.
Submit your site
This tool allows you to submit a page to Bing to be discovered by our crawler.
f you haven’t had a chance to create a Bing webmaster tools account yet, but you want to submit a new site or page to Bing, this is where you can go to let Bing know your site exists.
With the Submit your Site tool you can specify a subdomain or root domain to be evaluated for search indexation. The submit URLs featured in Webmaster Tools allows you to submit up to 10 URLs per day with a maximum of 50 URLs per month and it only tracks root domains.
Mobile friendliness test tool
This tool allows Bing to analyze a webpage to determine if it is mobile friendly or not. Test how easily a visitor can access your site on a mobile device and see what each page looks like on a mobile device.
This tool is super simple to use. Type in the full URL to the webpage you want to test and hit enter. The test is fairly quick (typically less than a minute to run) and will include a screenshot of how the page looks to Bing on a mobile device as well as any issues uncovered with usability.
If Bing can’t access the page it will display an error message like this:
Some of the causes could be network connectivity issues, the site being down, or a robots.txt file blocking Bingbot.
