Microsoft Bing has added some new metrics to the search performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools. The new metrics include crawl requests, crawl errors & indexed pages – all of which are really not directly related to the performance of your search results in Microsoft Bing.
Frank Sandtmann, a reader, notified us of this new feature this morning and it is indeed new. We do not see an announcement about this from Microsoft. Nor does the current documentation from Microsoft mention these three new metrics.
What is looks like. Here is a screen shot of the new graph plotting these new metrics, crawl requests, crawl errors & indexed pages.
Here is what it looked like when Microsoft launched this in February 2020.
Microsoft did add the “average position” metric between February and sometime in 2020 but the crawl requests, crawl errors & indexed pages were just recently added.
Why crawl and indexing data in this report. Bing did place reports from crawling and indexing reporting other areas, like the sitemaps report, crawl control and URL inspection tool. But now you can see, over time, how Bing is crawling and indexing your site and if there are errors. This brings all the data into one place, which can be useful.
Why we care. This gives webmasters, site owners and publishers more data to look at when trying to understand how well their sites are performing in Microsoft Bing search. You can now quickly see if a spike in crawl errors has resulted in a drop in organic traffic. You can see if an increase in crawl activity resulted in an increase in organic traffic. New data is always welcome.
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Source: IAB