How Does Bing Hold Up Against Google’s Redesigned Webmaster Tools?
Posted on 17. Jun, 2009 by Dave in ActionScript, SEO, WordPress
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So on that note I recently decided to check out Microsoft’s latest service Google’s new rival search engine Bing – what Microsoft is calling the “decision making engine” – Microsoft launched Bing two weeks ago with a massive marketing budget that sources say ranged between $80 million and $100 million.
But that’s another story… What I was actually looking forward to seeing was if on the eve of Bing, MS had done something spectacular with their Web Master Center and see how I liked it verses Google’s redesigned Webmaster Tools.
First off what both of these tools aim to do is improve your site’s visibility in search results – with that being said, I’m not recommending you use one verses the other – you obviously should use both to ensure optimum search result from both services.
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What I was looking for in this comparison was primarily usability, functionality and the overall usefulness of the package.
Setup and registration: Both MS Webmaster Central and Google are just about the same – you basically need to create an account, both require you to authenticate ownership of the website and both allow you to add and manage multiple websites.
Dashboard: Google is simpler and more intuitive than MS. Google now has everything grouped together in three categories: Site configuration (where you provide Google with information about your site), Your site on the web (where you can view Google data about your site), and Diagnostics (where you can get reports on any problems Google may have encountered while crawling your site).
MS, on the other hand, does not have very many features and it actually pretty gawky and often difficult to navigate.
Features: The one feature of Google’s Webmaster Tools that I think totally outranks MS is Your site on the web, here as previously mentioned, you can actually see Google data about your site – this particular category has 5 sub features: Top search queries (where you can get information about queries that have returned pages from your site – also shows what queries searchers clicked to access your website, and the position in which your site appeared in these searches), Links to your site (provides a list of external pages that link to http://mydomain.com), Keywords (shows you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site.), Internal links (a list of pages linked to by other pages on your site) and Subscriber stats – Subscriber stats display the number of Google users who have subscribed to your feeds using any Google product (such as Reader, iGoogle, or Orkut).
Out of these five features the one I find myself using most is Keywords – again this a list of the most significant keywords Google found while crawling your site.
Google actually recommends you check this page often and be on the lookout for unexpected keywords such as “Viagra” as this may be a sign that your site has been hacked. Similarly If expected keywords are missing from this page, this could be a sign that Google wasn’t able to crawl and index all the pages of your site.
In sum I found Google’s Redesigned Webmaster Tools to be light-years ahead of MS, primarily because the information provided was very comprehensive and many times more useful than MS.
Your thoughts are important to us! What have you found to be the most useful features on either service? Have you had some success with these tools? Do you have an idea on this or any other topic that you would like to share?
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