aristotle - 11:45 pm on Jan 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

Last summer I submitted a website to some free directories, and got listings approved in most of them within a short time. Some of these links have subsequently appeared in the external links lists in Google's Webmaster Tools, so I know that Google must have indexed the directory pages that contain the listings.

Today I came across an old list of ten of the directories I submitted to last summer. Out of curiosity, I checked to see how many of the pages containing my site's istings are currently indexed in Bing and Google. To my surprise, I found that Bing hasn't indexed any of them, whereas Google has indexed 9 out of 10.

I also discovered that Google has indexed two wordpress.com blogs I started in 2008 and then abandoned, whereas Bing hasn't indexed either of them.

So out of a total of 12 pages that I checked, Google has indexed 11 of them, but Bing hasn't indexed any.

Of course this isn't a big sample, or a random sample. But it does seem to indicate that Google crawls deeper, and/or has less stringent requirements for what it indexes.