In terms of popularity, the Google search engine and webmaster tools are way ahead of Microsoft’s equivalent. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft has given up the fight to impress more search users as and webmasters. Recently, the company launched the new Bing Site Scan tool, which is targeted at website owners.
Microsoft created Site Scan to help with website performance diagnostics. You can use the tool anytime you need to investigate potential technical issues affecting your website’s optimization for the Bing search experience.
Scanning should highlight flaws that you need to fix to deliver a better experience for people coming to your website. The improvements you implement as a result of the scan can also help with site optimization for other search engines, including Google.
Site Scan is an on-demand site audit tool which crawls your site and checks for common technical SEO issues. Fixing these issues will make your website search engine and user friendly. With this tool, you can improve your website performance not only on Bing but on other search engines as well.
As you may already know, scanning a website can also have undesired effects on its performance. That’s why Site Scan lets you apply settings to ensure you don’t compromise the user experience while investigating your website.
Here are the advanced settings you may apply to optimize the scanner:
Crawling speed: You can specify the number of URLs you want scanned per second. However, high speeds can affect the performance of the site during the scan.
Max scan depth: Use the setting to specify the pages you need crawled based on a specific amount of clicks from the starting page.
URL parameters: This lets you tell Bing about URL parameters to ignore without impacting the quality of the scan.
Ignore Robots.txt: You can tell Bing Site Scan to override any Robots.txt restrictions in place.
