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
-
Old content with trailing `/` - What should be my new approach?
Dear team Moz, I'm investigating SEO issues for the site that dropped rankings over a period of 4-6 months; after conversion from old platform (xenForo) to new custom developed platform. The old version of the site was a simple xenForo based forum; with threads having standard url structure as like www.domain.com/threads/thread-title.{thread_id}/. Notice the trailing slash. We chose to keep the URLs intact during conversion to new platform; however the site still lost rankings. I'm sure there could be multiple reasons for it - but I wish to know if I should adjust the URLs - 1. By 301 redirecting all the URLs with trailing / to the URLs without /. 2. Leave the URLs as they were. I must also mention that the new site has several new sections; and the old forum is just one part of it. The rest of the site follows URLs without trailing / - as it's the recommended URL structure by Google. I'd really appreciate your suggestions on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaustubhKatdare0 -
NGinx rule for redirecting trailing '/'
We have successfully implemented run-of-the-mill 301s from old URLs to new (there were about 3,000 products). As normal. Like we do on every other site etc. However, recently search console has started to report a number of 404s with the page names with a trailing forward slash at the end of the .html suffix. So, /old-url.html is redirecting (301) to /new-url.html However, now for some reason /old-url.html/ has 'popped up' in the Search Console crawl report as a 404. Is there a 'blobal' rule you can write in nGinx to say redirect *.html/ to */html (without the forward slash) rather than manually doing them all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
How often does the WMT incoming links gets updated?
Hi, We made some drastic changes removing links (mainly resulted from one domain) and wondered when we should expect a change in the incoming links report of Google's WMT...? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How long does it take for google to update title and metadata?
I updated my site's title and description about a week ago, however for some reason it's still not reflected in google search results. Here's my site and try searching for 'shopious directory'. Any idea why this is? I tried looking at webmaster tool and it seems that google didn't have any errors. Why is it still showing the old data?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba0 -
Updating existing content - good or bad?
Hi All, There are many situations where I encounter the need (or the wish) to update existing content. Here are few reasons: Some update turned up on the subject that does not justify a new posy / article but rather just adding two lines. The article was simply poorly written yet the page has PR as it is a good subject and is online for quite some time (alternatively I can create a new and improved article and 301 the old one to the new). Improving titles and sub titles of old existing articles. I would love to hear your thoughts on each of the reasons... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet1 -
Duplicate Page Content / Titles Help
Hi guys, My SEOmoz crawl diagnostics throw up thousands of Dup Page Content / Title errors which are mostly from the forum attached to my website. In-particular it's the forum user's profiles that are causing the issue, below is a sample of the URLs that are being penalised: http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=1308 I thought that by adding - http://www.mywebsite.com/subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp to my robots.txt file under 'Ignore' would cause the bots to overlook the thousands of profile pages but the latest SEOmoz crawl still picks them up. My question is, how can I get the bots to ignore these profile pages (they don't contain any useful content) and how much will this be affecting my rankings (bearing in mind I have thousands of errors for dup content and dup page titles). Thanks guys Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaz33420 -
Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website. With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name? The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above? Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish1 -
Good Google SERPS but poor bing and yahoo rankings.
My site has some good google SERPS but yahoo and bing don't rank it well at all. I know of course they have different algorithms to google but I would expect there to be some correlation. Why does google appear to consider my site valuable and return it for search queries and yahoo/bing don't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0