Bing/Yahoo! Updates

[BedeFahey]

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?

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[BedeFahey]

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...

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[BedeFahey]

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.

[AlanMosley]

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.

[BedeFahey]

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!

[AlanMosley]

Can we get a url, it could be so many things.