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Google search engine is more popular, and Google Webmaster Tools is more widespread, but you cannot disregard Bing. Bing search engine has bypassed Yahoo and it now the second most popular search engine in the US. Bing Webmaster Tools can be useful too, in removing duplicate URLs from the crawler’s path for example.

Adding a canonical tag is not the perfect solution for the duplicate content and URLs issue, they claim in Bing, since search engines will continue visiting the canonical source to check if it changed and to compare the source’s content and the destination content. That way, the crawler’s limited broadband is being wasted on pages that are not meant to be seen and this needless crawling can have a negative effect on the website’s ranking.

Therefore, Bing recommends using a Webmaster Tools feature named URL Normalization that lets you add special parameters to the URLs that should be ignored by Bing’s crawlers. The added parameters will be removed before indexing and the URL will appear clean on the search results. Bing crawler will not visit the listed pages.

Image source: bing.com

This feature also lets you see the most common duplicate URLs on your website. Additionally, you can track the URLs indexed by the search engine using the “Index Explorer” feature available on the Bing Webmaster Tools menu.