Bing Webmaster Tools Updated, Now with Silverlight 4

The Bing team has just released an updated version of the Bing Webmaster Tools, which has been overhauled based on feedback from webmaster and SEO communities. The Tools now include new features like “Index Explorer,” which lets you browse through the Bing index to verify which of your directories and pages have been included and “Submit URLs,” which lets you, not surprisingly, submit specific URLs to Bing for inclusion in the index.

Other features let you examine issues the Bing bot encounters while crawling your site, a “Block URLs” feature and, perhaps best of all, the addition of Microsoft Silverlight 4 support. With the new Silverlight integration, the Tools can take advantage of Silverlight’s “rich charting functionality,” according to the Bing team blog post. That will help you analyze up to “six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data.”

Those who already have Bing Webmaster Center accounts have been automatically upgraded to the new tools. New users can sign up here.