In our continuing efforts to provide great value to our publishers, the Bing Engineering team is constantly testing new features to improve crawl efficiency. Such experiments are vital to our ability to innovate and improve our end user and publisher experience. Due to an upcoming experiment, a few sites may encounter an intermittent increase )anywhere from 5% to 25%( in crawl requests from MSNBot over the next month )specifically from August 25 th through end of September(.

Today, we are announcing the release of new features for the Bing Webmaster tools. These features are a direct response to feedback we've received since our launch last month which was announced in Anthony's " A New Beginning: Bing Webmaster Tools " blog post. The loudest feedback was, "I want to download my data!" . . . so, we've added a new data export capability which enables you to export and download data from Bing Webmaster Tools about your registered sites.

In my last post , I started digging in to the many great new features offered in the new Bing Webmaster Tools . We have so much to talk about that I needed two posts to cover it! Let's get right back in the saddle and ride this horse back home. Note: As in the Tips and Tricks Part 1 post , the features I discuss here are primarily based on the Silverlight version of the new Bing Webmaster Tools. While there is a basic, down level version of the tools available,

I trust by now everyone has heard the big news : the new Bing Webmaster Tools are here! I have been working with it for quite some time now. I like the new look and feel of the Silverlight -based user interface. It is clean, intuitive, and easy to use. As the primary contributor to the tool's documentation, I've had some interesting discoveries as the tools were developed,

Today, were announcing the release of the updated Bing Webmaster Tools . After the Bing launch, we reached out to the webmaster and SEO communities to see how we could improve the webmaster tools. Your feedback was very consistent: you wanted more transparency to see how Bing crawls and indexes your sites, more control over your content in the Bing Index, and more information to help you optimize your sites for Bing. So whats new in the updated Bing Webmaster Tools?

Editor's note: In our continuous effort to make this blog as compelling as possible to our large and diverse audience, we are expanding the scope of the Bing Webmaster Center blog. Starting with this post, we will host occasional posts from "guest bloggers" from within Microsoft who work on search or use search-related technologies in their daily jobs. They will offer the perspective of a user of search engine optimization )SEO( services )just like you!

I have a quick post today. The Bing Developer Center blog recently published an informative post on using the Bing Advanced Query Language. The guide they reference covers a deep dive into search command operators with detailed descriptions and examples. I thought this might be of interest to the webmaster community as well, so I am posting a link to it here. For more information, check out the post Guide to Bing Query Language Published . Enjoy! See you again soon!

This is the fourth of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review ) Part 1 (, then took an initial look at page-level issues ) Part 2 (, followed by a discussion of site-wide issues ) Part 3 (, that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this post, we continue our look at site-wide issues that should also be examined in a site review.

This is the last of five posts on the topic of conducting your own site reviews. In the previous posts, we discussed why you'd want to perform a site review ) Part 1 (, then took an initial look at page-level issues ) Part 2 (, followed by a discussion of site-wide issues ) Part 3 and Part 4 (, that can affect site performance for users and search engine ranking. In this last post, we'll look at additional, architectural issues that should also be examined in a site review.

Since our last post in November , the Bing team has been busy rolling out improvements to the Bing web crawler. As a result of this work, we want to announce in advance our plans to change the name of our crawler )aka user agent(. Out of beta with a new name On October 1 st , 2010 , we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft's new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2.

The Bing blogs and forums team are grateful for the growing participation and readership of our user community. We've worked hard over the past year to provide compelling content that will help our users get the most out of the Bing experience. We sincerely hope that our readers and participants continue to find value in the content we produce! The reader comments left in the Bing blogs and forums have always been governed by our published Code of Conduct policies.

In Part 1 of this series of blog posts on site reviews, we covered the whats and whys of conducting a site review of your website to see if you are ranking where you want to be. If you have compelling content to share with your users, you want them to find your site! After installing and registering to use the many webmaster tools available on the Web )such as the Bing Webmaster Center tools and the Free SEO Toolkit !(,

For webmasters who work hard to build and publish their sites, it can be frustrating when their sites are barely indexed and rank poorly across all search engines. They may think, "Why does this happen? What can I do to improve this?" The reasons for poor ranking are nearly as myriad as the number of sites on the Web. Your site may be competing against some very well established, well-designed sites in your industry niche. Your competitors may have published a ton of useful,

Today's forum thread of note is a discussion around what can be done to optimize image content for SEO. Several members of the Bing Webmaster Center forum community have chimed in with helpful advice. What do you do on your site to optimize images? What have you found to be most important when adding images to a website? Join in the conversation! To see this forum conversation thread from the beginning, check out How do we optimize images?

We have another interesting conversation thread to highlight today as our latest From the Forums column selection. One of our helpful users in the Bing community posted his list of the top "45 points for SEO." This post has generated a good many forum reader replies - most positive, a few critical, and many contributing their own additional points to the conversation. What are your top tech tips for SEO? What have you done to improve your site? What's been successful for you?

Today's highlighted conversation in the From the Forums column has a user ask, "What are the most important tasks for SEO?". The conversation started back a while ago, but the quantity and quality of ideas generated are interesting to peruse. I want to specifically point out the recent post to this conversation by Brett Yount , our forums administrator )who, as of late, seems to be receiving more and more queries addressed to "Mr. Bing"(,

Today's installment of the From the Forums column involves a user who had difficulties getting the required authentication code installed on the default page of her website so she could take advantage of the Bing Webmaster Center tools . The customized authentication code issued by Bing Webmaster Center ensures that only the site owner who registered with Webmaster Center can get access to the detailed information about the site as collected by the Bing search crawler.

In another installment of the From the Forums column, today we have an interesting thread about a website that updated its content and used 301 redirects to migrate users to the new content. However, the transition to the new content in the Bing index was taking longer than they expected. The old content was not fading away. The amazing volunteer members of our community jumped right in and began examining the site in question.

We in the Bing Webmaster Center team are very fortunate to have such a bright, vibrant, and helpful community of users in our Webmaster Center forums . From time to time, I will take a moment to highlight some useful and interesting threads found in the forums. The goal of this new, periodically published blog column is multifold. First, I want to identify the Webmaster Center forums as a useful resource for webmasters and SEOs who have questions pertaining to Bing,

The Bing Webmaster Center team has been very busy lately, working on very cool stuff that we can't wait to share with you )patience, Grasshopper - all will be revealed in time(. But the blog waits for no one )well, that's the intent, anyway(. From time to time, we gather up enough interesting tidbits of Q&A that we want to share with all of our blog readers. Now it's that time again. So let's get to it.