Week 31 brought some useful news for SEO specialists, the most important being Bing’s new Webmaster Tools and its robots.txt testing tool, but also Google Search Console image license structured data. You may see the most important details below:
- Bing redesigned Webmaster Tools and relaunched robots.txt tester
- Google Search Console: support for image license structured data
Bing redesigned Webmaster Tools and relaunched robots.txt tester
Bing followed Google’s initiative to update old webmaster tools and announced that it launched its new Bing Webmaster Tools. The new interface includes a redesigned URL inspection tool, a site scan feature, (useful to detect technical SEO problems) but also new guidelines.
How to access the new Bing Webmaster Tools:
The new version can be accessed here https://www.bing.com/webmasters/homepage, while the old version that is planned to go away is still available at https://www.bing.com/webmasters/homepage
For many years, Bing was missing a robots.txt testing tool like Google. During week 31 Bing team relaunched it and so far seems to be a huge improvement, as testing works better than before.
The relaunch of Bing robots.txt tester
The tool has a clean layout, with straightforward titles and fields. This makes it very pleasant to work with.
How to access the new Bing robots.txt
You can try the new robots.txt here.
If you are a webmaster, you can see all technical details including troubleshooting of Bing’s new robotx.txt testing tool in the documentation.
Google Search Console: support for image license structured data
For those that own great images on their website and use metadata or image license structured data, it’s important to know that during week 31 Google just updated GSC to support it.
As this data is visible in Google Search by clicking on the respective image, website, or image owners will be able to find out the number of times each image has been displayed to Google Search users.
