Bing's indexed pages vs pages appearing in results
-
Hi all
We're trying to increase our efforts in ranking for our keywords on Bing, and I'm discovering a few unexpected challenges. Namely, Bing is reporting 16000+ pages have been crawled... yet a site:mywebsite.com search on Bing shows less than 1000 results.
I'm aware that Duane Forrester has said they don't want to show everything, only the best. If that's the case, what factors must we consider most to encourage Bing's engine to display most if not all of the pages the crawl on my site?
I have a few ideas of what may be turning Bing off so to speak (some duplicate content issues, 301 redirects due to URL structure updates), but if there's something in particular we should monitor and/or check, please let us know. We'd like to prioritize
Thanks!
-
Yep, if Bing Webmaster Tools doesn't show problems with the sitemap, I'd focus on the points I highlighted back in mid-June on this thread (make content robust, unique, and make sure text is in HTML).
Good luck,
Kristina
-
Hello again Kristina
Bing's showing 38,885 pages indexed... and I've noticed the amount of pages vary after clicking through several pages.
So I guess the problem isn't why aren't they indexing, but rather why aren't they showing all pages. I'd assume this is related to page quality (content, on-page ranking factors, etc)?
-
I haven't heard of Bing keeping historically submitted sitemaps and confusing them, although I know that they're very picky about the number of inaccuracies they find in a sitemap, so it's possible they keep the latest one around so they can refer to it if the current one seems to have holes.
That said - when you search for your site, are the same pages coming up on the first page? What about the second? Third? The number of pages that come up when you search for site:mysite.com are approximations and can vary even as you scroll through the results pages. The more important question is, how many pages does Bing say are indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools?
-
Just an update:
Bing reported a successful crawl after submitting a new one, then rejected it based on an error that it didn't describe. Took it down, made a change to URL itself (somehow the .gz extension wasn't there) and resubmitted on 7/7/13.
Since then, Bing has reported a successful crawl, then reported a successful crawl on 6/30/13 (7 days before submission?), then reported a failed crawl on 7/5/13 (2 days before submission?) and now today again reporting a successful crawl on 7/7/13.
So my question now is... does Bing keep record of historically submitted sitemaps and confuse them with new submissions of the same ones? I've yet to see Bing actually index what's in the sitemaps, as a site: operator search is still a daily fluctuation between 1200 and 3300 results, sometimes going up to 4400. But again, this is daily. Right now, searching site:roadtrippers.com on Bing reports 4,420 results. Later today, I imagine it'll be around 3,300 or 1,200.
Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated.
-
Good luck!
If these tips don't work, you should follow up here again, but include a little more information about your site. It's possible that Bing IS crawling all of your pages properly, but something about them is making Bing think that they aren't valuable enough to be in their indexes. I'd particularly look to see if:
- Content seems to be duplicate, either within your site or if it's duplicated elsewhere
- Content is extremely thin (less than 100 words on a page/no unique text above the fold)
- Content is unreadable by Bing: check the cached version of a page that's not indexed and make sure you can read the unique content
Hope this helps! I'm going to mark this question as "answered," only because if you have a follow up question, it'll probably be more specific now that you have more information, and I'd like all of that info to be included in the original question.
Best,
Kristina
-
Hey Kristina
It has not unfortunately.
Bing reports successful crawls, however it's not crawling it - at all.
After reading more about Bing's sitemap preferences, there are a few things left to try. I'm using this post on Bing's forums http://www.bing.com/blogs/webmaster/f/12248/t/659635.aspx#9602607 as a reference for now. We're going to make a temporary separate sitemap for Bing to test what is suggested in that link. Hopefully something sticks and we can make some progress going forward!
Brandon
-
Hi Brandon,
Just wanted to check in - did using 1 sitemap work?
Kristina
-
I believe I've found the solution - as recently as 2009, Bing was only crawling one sitemap per website. It also said Bing would only crawl the most recently submitted sitemap but it doesn't appear that was the case for our site.
So I've since removed the old sitemap and am waiting to see some evidence of our new sitemap being crawled and indexed.
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
-
Do orphan pages take away link juice?
Hi, Just wondering about this whether the orphan pages take away any link juice? We been creating lot of them these days only to link from external sites as landing pages on our site. So, not linking from any part of our website; just linking from other websites. Also, will they get any link juice if they are linked from our own blog-post? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
How to get gold star reviews on SERP's
Hello I have always wanted to know: How to get gold star reviews on Google in search results! Please look at the screenshot to see what I am talking about. Please can someone share with me the knowledge required to make this happen - it would be perfect for my e-commerce website! GLkOK
Algorithm Updates | | xdunningx1 -
Wistia vs. YouTube
Hello, Mozzers! Sorry if I've missed a thread on this, but I didn't find anything after searching for a while... I've used Wistia for years - LOVE the service and the company! Had great luck getting Rich Snippets, ranked well... until the recent Google change. Now all of my Wistia thumbnails have disappeared (though my rankings have stayed strong, thank goodness!) M question is, does it make sense to now embed YouTube videos on our site, and to create a video sitemap with those pages, with the hope that Google will rank the page better than it otherwise would have, knowing that there is valuable (video) content on the page? This is new videos, I'm not thinking of replacing my Wistia videos at this time. I'll probably need to clarify as I see your responses, since this is a tricky set of interrelated decisions. Thanks for any thoughts that anyone may have! 🙂 ~ Scott
Algorithm Updates | | measurableROI1 -
Has Bing rolled out an algorithm update?
Hi everyone, Does anyone know if Bing has rolled out an algorithm update recently? I have noticed a decent change in Bing/Yahoo results recently. Searching online only produces results for Google's updates. Thanks in advance for your help.
Algorithm Updates | | DirectiveSEO0 -
Privacy page ranking above home page in serps
I'm using OSE to try and get some clues as to why my privacy page would rank higher than my home page. Could anyone help me figure out which metrics to review to rectify the issue? My key word is: Mardi Gras Parade Tickets The url that is ranking is <cite>www.mardigrasparadetickets.com/pages/privacy</cite> I'm happy to be ranking in the top 3 for the keyword, but I'd rather hoped it wouldn't be my privacy page. Any help would be awesome, Cy
Algorithm Updates | | Nola5040 -
Does Google or Bing use words in the page title beyond the displayed limit for ranking purposes?
Standard good practice for on-page SEO includes keeping page title length below the maximum that Google displays in the SERPs. But words in the title beyond that maximum can be indexed, even if they don't show in the SERPs for end users. For ranking purposes, is there any value in words beyond the character limit in page titles that are truncated in the SERPs?
Algorithm Updates | | KyleJB0 -
Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?
When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0