Webmasters and web analysts have two main tools at their disposal to optimize visibility or check the indexing status of their websites – Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console has been around since 2006. Before May of 2015, it was known as Google Webmaster Tools. While Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools launched mid-way through 2009.
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While Google’s version is much more robust than Bing’s, all is not lost in using both. The differences between Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can be seen in the following features.
- Dashboard – When you log in to either of these two services, you will see some important statistics. Google will give you the basics about your site as it appears in Google’s index, such as search queries and site errors. You will also get malware alerts if your site is compromised and unnatural link warnings if you’ve been dabbling in shady SEO. Bing will give you similar information about your website, including clicks resulting from searches to an inbound link count.
- Website configuration – The configuration section for both tools is basically the same. With Google, the tool can give your website specific locations to target users in search. Bing allows you to manually submit URLs and block specific pages on your site from appearing in Bing search. And similar to Google’s Disavow Tool, you can also tell Bing to ignore incoming links to a site that might be spammy or unnatural. Google makes disavowing easier by allowing a single formatted file to be uploaded, while Bing requires you to tediously submit links one-by-one.
- Crawl reports – Both tools offer analytics to help you learn more about any issues that might discourage search engines from ranking your site.
- Search queries – Google will tell you the keywords that have led to most impressions of your website. Bing will give you similar reports about keywords that appeared in a search for a period ranging from 30 days to 6 months. As of Google’s 2018 update, their data goes back 18 months.