Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
-
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
-
Just noticed this response. I got a hold of someone at Microsoft and what happened was the site was never re-indexed as https. This drop in traffic lasted a few 6 weeks or so while the site was being re-indexed. It is now back to normal. So strange there was a year delay in htps indexing.
-
Hmmm, then this is most likely a Bing over-optimization issue. Like I said before, they are infinitely pickier and they don't communicate as much.
Your URLs stayed the same, but did you add any content in the redesign? Are you willing to share the site with us?
-
Robots.txt and htaccess are both good.
Switched to https over a year ago
Sitemap has no errors.
We did a site redesign and launched. All of the urls stayed the same though.
-
Any number of things. I'll try to list a few here:
- Banned bingbot or its IP address range in your robots.txt or .htaccess file
- Changed to https recently?
- Sitemap has many errors - Bing is much pickier than Google on this.
Did anything change about the site recently? Bing is much pickier about the data they get, the links you get, and ANY kind of overoptimization.
-
I have claimed it, the indexation since site launch has really decreased. Any ideas on what would cause my index to decrease while it would stay the same on Google?
-
I checked all the regular stuff. My Google traffic is probably up by about 10% so if it was something like a robots problem I think Google would have picked it up as well which is why I am so unsure on what to look at.
-
Have you claimed the site in Bing Webmaster Tools? How's the indexation in there?
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
-
Hi. Has anyone seen a drop in their PA recently? We have over 40 clients and 80% dropped and it has been like this for the past 2 months. I wanted to check if other websites are also experiencing this drop or is it just us?
I'm specifically asking for drops happened in the last 2 months, because before that we had a normal trend. Some websites would go up in their PA rankings and some would drop. But seeing 80% of our clients drop like this is just weird. Just wanted to see if other market leaders are also having the same issue so I can stop attributing it something X-Filish! Our clients are all .EDUs if anyone was wondering. Also the maximum drop has been 4 points in a month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AP_Search0 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Number of indexed pages dropped. No manual action though?
I have a client who had their WordPress site hacked. At that point there was no message from Google in webmaster tools and the search results for their pages still looked normal. They paid sitelock to fix the site. This was all about a month ago. Logging into Webmaster Tools now there are still no messages from Google nor anything on the manual actions page. Their organic traffic is essentially gone. Looking at the submitted sitemap only 3 of their 121 submitted pages are indexed. Before this all of them where in the index. Looking at the index status report I can see that the number of indexed pages dropped completely off the map. We are sure that the site is free of malware. This client has done no fishy SEO practices. What can be done?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | connectiveWeb0 -
Profound Rankings Drop - But only on Branded query
Hi all. I apologize for any redundancy in advance. I've seen similar queries about branded search but nothing that quite resembles mine. First of all, my site is Withdrawal-ease.com In the last few weeks, I've seen a significant drop in ranking for specific pages on my site that normally rank well in a brand search. I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on. So I looked at a bunch of queries for branded terms and it looks like I've been penalized...but I haven't For instance, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I would typically see my home page first and then 3-4 of my most popular pages/posts directly underneath in the organic listings. Some of those popular pages include: http://withdrawal-ease.com/proven-home-remedies-for-opiate-withdrawal/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-opiates-at-home/ http://withdrawal-ease.com/how-to-detox-from-suboxone-at-home/ Although the titles are similar, the content is all original and comprehensive...it's good content that has always ranked very well...and still does. But as of Late March they don't show up for branded searches. Now, when I google "Withdrawal Ease" I only get my home page listed and the other pages have all fallen to #60 according to Moz, WMT etc. What is strange is the fact that these popular pages still rank highly for my key terms and relevant searches. I have not noticed any significant drops other than when I do a branded search. I have added a picture from WMT as an example. The image displays a search from my brand name and my most popular page that would typically have ranked #2 below my homepage. As you can see. the impressions and clicks fall, then jump and then totally disappear for my branded query. Looking at the chart, one might observe that the mobile update seems to roughly correspond to the rankings drop but we've been very diligent about being mobile friendly and all of the checks for mobile friendliness pass with flying colors. I've looked at Robot TXT files and everything is fine there...all of our diagnostic tests have turned up nada as far as I can tell. Again, I have not been informed of any manual penalty and my backlink profile is not raising any alarms on Moz; I get a 1 on the spam score. We do not actively seek out links because I DID have a manual penalty in 2010 due to a horrible experience with an SEO firm. It took me over a year and 15k to clear out all of the spammy links that this guy got and I was finally cleared of the penalty in 2013. So I'm totally flummoxed. My organic search is now down significantly across ALL browsers...but again, just for branded searches. I have also attached an image of my crawl stats just in case this may shed any light. Thank you all so much for any help that you can provide; it's been extremely stressful and frustrating so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Whoa.jpg crawl%20stats.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gcat3330 -
Why has my site dropped off the face of Google???
Hi All, My site was ranking well for a long time and suddenly can't be seen at all any more. I have been trying to figure this out for some time and can't get to the bottom of it. Funny thing is also even when searching for my site with a keyword "snowboard gulmarg" my URL www.klinehinmalaya.com does not appear and somewhere way back in the listing my another page www.klinehimalaya.com/packages.php comes up. Any help would be good right now. Thanks in advance, Catherine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | caherinechan0 -
Massive decreases in traffic
Hi i've been looking at the affects of googles algorithmic updates over the last couple years and the impact on sites/competitors i have been monitoring in the space. Two sites which surprised me, in having a dramatic decline in search traffic were: kriskris.com (over 200k visitors to around 10k) only-cookware.com (from 40k visitors at its peak to only around 1000k) (semrush traffic data attached) Both sites have great quality content and social signals. The only thing i can think of is a over-optimization of anchor text, and types of links. dnrm0Oa.png cuaLzrI.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Should I 301 Poorly Worded URL's which are indexed and driving traffic
Hi, I'm working on our sites structure and SEO at present and wondering when the benefit I may get from a well written URL, i.e ourDomain / keyword or keyphrase .html would be preferable to the downturn in traffic i may witness by 301 redirecting an existing, not as well structured, but indexed URL. We have a number of odd looking URL's i.e ourDomain / ourDomain_keyword_92.html alongside some others that will have a keyword followed by 20 underscores in a long line... My concern is although i would like to have a keyword or key phrase sitting on its own in a well targeted URL string I don't want to mess to much with pages that are driving say 2% or 3% of our traffic just because my OCD has kicked in.... Some further advice on strategies i could utilise would be great. My current thinking is that if a page is performing well then i should leave the URL alone. Then if I'm not 100% happy with the keyword or phrase it is targeting I could build another page to handle the new keyword / phrase with the aim of that moving up the rankings and eventually taking over from where the other page left off. Any advice is much appreciated, Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guycampbell0 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0