Google Indexed = 35, 445 pages, Bing Indexed = 243 pages... Why?

[zDucketz]

Dear MozSquad,

Can anyone check our site and let me know if there's anything super apparent that would cause Bing to treat us like a bum on the street? I recently made some structural changes which really helped with Google, but Bing didn't even budge. It's a lot harder to keep up with all the SEO initiatives I have in mind with it being a small start-up where I'm responsible for planning the entire Internet Marketing campaign, giving constant input on UX and site design, etc on top of 900 other things, so I figured it'd be a good time to use The Moz to help a brother out. Ideas?

Domain: homeandgardendesignideas.com (yeah, I know it's a little long =P)

[zDucketz]

Certainly no issues for Bing, they're actually hitting us more than Google.

| 2 | 102718 | 7.22% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) |
| 3 | 75772 | 5.33% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |

[zDucketz]

Mike,

I think that actually did give me some pretty good insight which I hadn't thought of when I was initially considering methods to answer this question.

After digging into the index with some filters, what I'm seeing is that Bing is clearly lagging far behind Google regarding the speed in which they're picking up on changes. I'm looking at piles of things that were changed and re-structured weeks (or even a couple months) ago and it hasn't picked them up at all.  I don't think it's a problem on my end, because Google clearly has no problem crawling me. I guess I'll need to double-check the server logs and see what Bingbot's habits are.

I've always assumed they would be equal in how long t takes to update their indexes, etc and that they'd simply have slightly different algorithms, but looks like Goog/Bingie may differ much more in operation than I thought.

[Mike.Goracke]

Maybe give this Bing Index Explorer tool a whirl?

"The Index Explorer tool in the Reports & Data section provides you with a unique view of how Bing sees your site. It reflects all the URLs we have seen on the web, including redirects, broken links, or those blocked by robots.txt, organized in an file explorer-like fashion. This view can help you get some really detailed insights into how your site was seen by the search engine during recent crawls. It can help discover both issues on your site as well as opportunities."

Hope this helps.

Mike

[zDucketz]

I should have mentioned, I setup Bing Webmaster Tools originally and have kept up-to-date sitemaps in it for the past 3 or 4 months.

I've always noticed Bing to kind of lag behind Google, but I'm really surprised to only see ~500 pages indexed. I was once hired to do the SEO for an auto dealer who had dirty SEO and keyword stuffing all over his poorly structured site and I remember Bing being much more responsive to their site than they are to ours, even though they didn't even have BWMT setup prior to my involvement. Weird.

[KevinBudzynski]

Bing seems to always index much slower than Google, but agree with Mike. Anything you can do to help Bing crawl your site, do it.

[Mike.Goracke]

Did you submit a new sitemap in your Bing Webmaster Tools?

Mike