Courier, I'm biased on this one, but yes, it's worth signing up for the tools.

...and if, after you sign up for the tools, you see your traffic decrease, ping me. That shouldn't happen.

Though I'm interested to hear why you think it may happen if you sign up for the tools. Feel free to post up here or track me down via PM, if you like.

duane

Thanks bingdude for the confident assertion, I will sign up later today and see how things go.

Though I'm interested to hear why you think it may happen if you sign up for the tools.

Going back a few years when Google encouraged you to sign up to their webmaster tools and sitemaps, there followed a lot of people complaining that their rankings were effected.

I signed up but once all my pages were indexed, I never checked back. But no harm and looked very neat and informative.

Go BING (until you do your own Panda ;))

@courier - well, we're not Google... ;)

@walkman - Bing doesn't tend to make wholesale changes to it's algorithm, favoring a lighter touch, over a loonger period of time.

While it's true you'll here from websites who have "suddenly" seen indexation drop noticably, you never hear from the websites who's ranking increased as we cleaned out space in the index for higher quality content.

In almost every instance of indexation drop that I investigate, the culprit is thin content, duplicate content or a total lack of unique content. And while it may seem "sudden" to the website when it happens, it happens every day to hundreds of websites as we continually refine the definition of quality. And we don't simply sit in a room sipping Arnie Palmers with a wand, randomly pwanging results up and down. Quality is continually refined by searcher activity against our baseline - what we think is good + searcher reaction to our SERPs.

Some things are obviously not quality, and those are more easily dealt with, but much of the ranking is a fine balancing act.

Bing is also very aware that major changes can have major effects. As far reaching as to potentially shut down businesses, so we're not usually in favor of making dramatic changes. That said, you never know what the spammers of tomorrow are going to figure out and target, so we also have to be ready to roll with the punches as they land. It's a tough balancing act, for sure.