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
-
Why is our pagerank is still only 3/10?
Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
Canonical and Rel=next/prev Implementation
Hi, I have an ecommerce site that allows users to view numerous pages and sort by a number of options on categories. I've read numerous posts around my issue but am still a little confused on what is best practice with regards to the canonical tag and rel=next and prev. Below is an example of the various page/sort by URL's: Paginated URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?p=3 Sort by URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?dir=desc&order=price Paginated & Sort by URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?dir=desc&order=price&p=3 It is not viable for us to use a canonical tag to the view all page as some of the categories contain a large number of products and therefore would not have the best load speeds. Is it best to use the below structure when it comes to the canonical tag and rel=next and prev? Paginated URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?p=3 Sort by URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?dir=desc&order=price Paginated & Sort by URL: http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?dir=desc&order=price&p=3 http://www.example.co.uk/category/subcategory.html?dir=desc&order=price&p=2" /> Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why? More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request. Two weeks later, Google refused, saying.. "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes." We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites. Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site? What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them? Any other tips/tricks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TellThemEverything0 -
How important is the HTML structure for on-page/on-site SEO?
To be more specific, say a page layout has Header, Body, Left Sidebar, Footer sections. Which layout from the following options is more SEO-friendly? Header > Body > Right Sidebar > Footer Body > Header > Right Sidebar > Footer Does it make a big difference to code HTML so that the the copy of the body appears in front of all other sections when spiders crawl a website? Is it worth taking extra steps to make this happen? I am asking this question because our site has a header navigation with a lot of dropdown menus. So I assume that this is "noise" for spiders as it pushes the main content of the page down. Please bear in mind that the question is more geared towards how search engine see the page rather than how it appears to the end user as layout can be controlled by CSS.This question also assumes that all other on-site SEO best practices are followed for both options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saugar0 -
How long for Google Webmaster tools to update/reflect link changes
Hi all, Does anyone know or have experience of how long GWMT takes to update its data?, we did some work on our link profile back in October/November but are still seeing old links (removed) showing in GWMT. Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | righty0 -
Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results. The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfxpixeldesigns
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic. So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation. #1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this. Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ? My planned course of action is to be as follows: #1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords. Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise. Thanks.0 -
Mozpoints not updating
Added 2 comments on 2 questions and my points are still at the same level. Anyone knows why? I don't.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mosaicpro0