Bing/Yahoo! Updates
-
On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion).
For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords.
The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article).
Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?
-
Hard to say without details, but I'd definitely get those 301s in place fast, if they fell through the cracks. Possibly the new site introduced a couple of home-page duplicates as well? (like "/" vs. "/index.html"). Might want to check the internal links and add rel-canonical to the home-page.
-
Thanks for the response!
Digging in further revealed that Bing has indexed only a handful of the new structure, while retaining old pages, including an old index.html - time to implement some redirects methinks.
I'm finding this very odd - I know bing indexed the new homepage, but it's now gone, replaced by index.html. Aside from redirects, I believe I'll go and try to track down links to index.html and get them changed.
Webmaster tools access is being problematic, but I'm working on that now. Oh the joys of having two companies in the mix...
-
Unfortunately, although Bing is more transparent about some policies, they're a little quieter about specific updates, and the SEO community just doesn't track the Bing algorithm very carefully. I'm not seeing any evidence of a similar drop in my own client sites, but that's anecdotal at best.
As Alan said, Bing is more aggressive about user signals and I'd add that social signals may have more impact as well, but like Google they seem to be changing the mix frequently.
I always start with the facts. You know you had a recent relaunch - are you seeing any side effects? Is Bing indexing a lot more pages (or duplicates)? Are they have any crawl issues. I'd definitely dig into Bing Webmaster Tools and see what kind of signals they're reporting - not just since 3/27, but since the relaunch. This could be a delayed impact of the changes you made.
-
Thanks Alan!
Good to know about the "trying it out" part. I wasn't aware of that one.
Think it's worth my time to submit through BWMT, or should I not as the site is already indexed?
I also spotted that Bing has the old index.html still indexed, which is odd, because last week it showed the domain.com as the homepage. I'll try implementing a 301 from index.html to domain.com and see how that goes.
-
Your rank on bing can certainly change without making changes, one of the signals bing use is user action, if people click on your serp, but then return to the search page and click on another serp, then it is assumed your page did not answer the query.
There is also somthing where if your serp gets more clicks than the one above it, you will take his place.
Also because these signals make it hard for a new site to get exposure they give any page sumited though BWMT a run, but if user action is not there it will drop again.
I have also had pages that have had big drops but come back again. Some times this can take weeks.
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks for your response. Normally, I'd be happy to provide the URL. Ironically, this is the only time we've ever worked with an NDA in place. Because of that, I'm uncomfortable sharing it. I know that limits the help people can provide.
That said, I'm operating on the assumption that this is more of an algorithmic change than an on-page issue. Here's why:
-
Neither the content or the structure of the site has changed since Bing last crawled. Even so, I've re-checked the structure, for noindex/nofollow tags, the functionality of robots.txt., as well as the content, and anything else I can think of. I'm not finding any issues.
-
The site has been very slowly climbing in rankings since late January, with Bing/Yahoo! crawling it multiple times since then.
-
The drop is site-wide, but in contacting Bing, I'm told it is indexed, and there are no "blocks that would affect your site's rank".
-
Finally, other people on Webmaster world and SEOroundtable are mentioning rank drops as well.
Do you think I'm wrong to make this assumption?
If not, have you or anyone else heard or seen anything about the ranking changes that I and others appear to be experiencing? (As mentioned in the article above from SEORoundtable)
Cheers!
-
-
Can we get a url, it could be so many things.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best comments system / plugin for websites
Hi, What is the best comments system / plugin for websites that not harm seo Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Google Update? Anyone seeing a drastic change in rankings?
Hey everyone, Has anyone seen a drastic change in clients Google Rankings, we have one which has dropped from 9.5% visibility to 5.4% in one month.. It's extremely worrying as I have never seen a drop like this before since I've managed the account, in fact rankings have increased month on month since we took over the account. I've also looked at google, no penalty showing, I've started removing spammy sites who link to us and also added no follow to some of the links on the site which linked out to try and keep some link juice in the site. Anything else I can try / do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unbranded_Lee2 -
Search Results not Updating (Title, Description, and URL)
Issue: I recently discovered that my site was accessible by both HTTP and HTTPS. The site has used a rel canonical tag to point to the HTTP version. Google+ was pointing to HTTPS though. The title, description, and URL shown in the results for the homepage is HTTPS, other pages are HTTP, etc... Steps taken to Resolve: This week I did the following... 301'd all non-checkout pages to the HTTP version Switched Google+ URL to HTTP version and added new post with an HTTP link to the homepage. Used webmaster tools to recrawl and reindex the site Resubmitted XML Sitemap No luck... the site is still not updating... any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all! Site is Here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement0 -
Which is better /section/ or section/index.php?
I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc. I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes
/section/index.php = 42/100 How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc. Any insight would be great 🐵0 -
Circular Canonical/Redirect
My client's site has an issue (see below) and I'm wondering how much it could be affecting crawlability. Has anyone seen a major rankings bump after fixing something like this? 1. In each page the rel=canonical is pointing to the http version of the page while the http version is redirecting to the https version. Basically, a circular redirect-canonical loop is occurring.2. The sitemap.xml is also referring to the http version of the pages rather than the https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elenaroi0 -
Page not showing up on Bing/Yahoo
We have a page that's ranking well on Google, however the page is not showing up in either Yahoo or Bing. What's even more odd is that for Y! and Bing, the page doesn't return in SERP even when you explicitly search for it (e.g. homepage + name of page). Instead, the result that gets returned is our homepage along with a Page Title that's been manipulated to include the keywords, but the title is not what we have in our title tag. Bing processed our sitemap today and I also manually submitted the URL, but it's still not turning up. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeLin0 -
Why does this show up in my browser/index2.php
i type is a clients site and BOOM...it suddenly ends with "index2.php" who will link to that? I can't seem to make it not appear...according the template creator... Is this "index2.php" affecting my link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0 -
Hosting / Redesign & Text Change
In the process of redesigning a clients site. The text and the design need to change to focus the site on conversions more than it is at present. The client is not happy with the current host, they want to change, my feeling is to either change a while before the site redesign is launched or a while after. Anyone got any opinions, experiences to share. Justin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrouchyKids0