Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Redirect Issue - Drop in ranking after CMS change
Hi Website - https://www.aasprint.com.au/ After we moved the site from wordpress to codeIgniter + angular there has been a huge drop in traffic and ranking. One of the thing we recently realized is the redirection - COULD THAT BE THE ISSUE? On the browser and sitemap the URL doesn't have "/" at the end When checked on redirection tool the URL seems to be redirecting to one with "/" at the end Attached are the screenshots. Also moz bar shows no redirection. However, the issue seems to be flagged by the site audit tool as 301 redirection. Not sure if it's the cause for the drop. What action to take? Any advice would be much appreciated. V7CNtqt j3dJ4TW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bhisshaun0 -
Why has my website been removed from Bing?
I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp0 -
Huge organic traffic drom after a perfect domain migration. What to do?
Hi, I already asked the question on different places. But so far nobody could help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dennis1992038
Hope someone can help me out. If possible.
I migrated my website https://vihara.nl to https://meditatieinstituut.nl and lost about 80% traffic (see printscreens). It's over more than a month ago now and there is no sign of getting it back up. Maybe there is nothing to do and
1. I have to be patient and traffic comes back in a few months.
or
2. There is nothing to do and I've lost everything I've build up in the last years. Start over again to get the rankings back.
or maybe, maybe
3. I just forgot something that I still need to do to get the rankings back up. Or there is something I did not think of... This is done: The website is migrated 1 on 1. No changes in content, url, code, etc. Everything is exactly the same as on the previous domain. 301 redirects whole domain (via htaccess a bulk redirect). All the old pages, without exceptions, lead to the exact new page. The new domain is running from CDN (Cloudflare) with the same settings as the previous domain. SSL is installed in the exact same way. Domain migration set up in Search console (working). Uploaded new sitemap (working). Updated internal links. Changed the most important external links (where I could get contact after reaching out) In meanwhile received some new external links and also posted new content Anybody knows what to do? Or do I just have to be more patient and will it come back in a few months by itself? Looking forward to suggetions. Thanks! Gerjan Migratie-Meditatie-Instituut-2048x786.jpg verloop-sinds-de-start-2048x355.jpg0 -
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
Bing Penalty
I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing. Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results. Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties? Here is what I have done so far: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request? Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856 there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post). Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0
