Bing Webmaster Tools is, like the name suggests, a suite of tools that are designed for webmasters to manage and monitor their websites' appearance in the Bing search engine. Google has a similar offering for its search engine called Google Search Console (GSC).
I use GSC almost daily for this website and some others that I run, but recently decided to check out Bing Webmaster Tools. I had tried it in the past, but to be honest, the tools and results were out-dated and not of much use. Add the fact that Bing does not send much traffic to my sites (most of my search engine traffic is from the mighty Google of course) and I did not use my account.
However, last week I heard that Microsoft had made some massive improvements to their webmaster tools, including allowing you to track competitors links. That kind of data can be very valuable, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately I was greeted with a broken site, the spacing and the fonts were all "messed up" and everything was in Times New Roman. The UI was incredibly ugly, not to mention hard to read and more or less unusable.
This was strange so I checked using other browsers (Chrome is my default), tried clearing cookies, the cache, incognito, etc. Nothing worked. I could not make the website look like I assumed it should. Instead, it looked like an old 1990s Geocities site.
This morning I decided to do some more digging into the CSS of Bing Webmaster Tools and see if I could work out what was going on. I discovered that the font that Microsoft was calling, via their CSS, was something called "Segoe UI". I then checked what Segoe UI should look like, and it definitely doesn't look like the Times New Roman that I was seeing on my screen, so something was wrong.
A quick Google search later (sorry Bing) and I discovered that apparently Segoe UI isn't included on, or won't work on Macs... or Chrome... or something. Anyway, it was clear that there was an issue with it. Then I stumbled across this Microsoft link which will let you download and install Segoe UI on your system.
After installing the font to the Font Book on my Mac, low and behold, Bing Webmaster Tools actually looked like I thought it should! Why the website was calling the font via its CSS and not also including the font source files too (much like how you can with Google Fonts), I have no idea.
I'm just glad I was able to solve the issue and and writing the story here in case anyone else encounters a similar issue. 🙂
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