Confusing lack of traffic from Bing

Domain indexed (and has sitelinks) but gets no traffic at all

[teenwolf]

I run a domain that is fairly old and has over 1000 pages. If you seach for domain or domain.com on Bing, it shows up #1 and has sitelinks as well.

However, a search of site:domain.com produces only the home page on page 1 of results. If you go to page 2, page 3, etc. other pages are there but page 1 of site:domain.com has only the home page of the site and no other results.

We have never received any traffic at all from Bing for this domain (other than searches for "domain"). So the question is, how does a site that is seemingly indexed and also shows up with sitelinks have ZERO traffic? Searches for a interior pages bring nothing at all. I can't even find interior pages on page 10+ of results.

A very confusing situation. Is it a penalty? An indexing error? Anyone seen this before or heard anything like this before?

[Spencer]

No, we're the same really ... only about 3 visitors from Bing per day. No conversions. My guess is all the traffic is from webmasters anyway.

[tangor]

I get 12% daily from Bing... all pages (some more than others, obviously) on a 1700 page site. Consider this pretty good for a "new" SE such as Bing. Y! comes in at 18%. G is 60-ish% and Other is the remainder. Domain dates from 1998. It is the content which brings it on, not SEO. Obviously preaching to the choir: Unless you build something that makes them want to come, they won't. Even if indexed by the SE's.

Keywords are important, yes, but keywords that don't excite, or have content behind them, are not likely to generate hits. And if you're trying to make money off the web do a LOT of research before expending the effort!

[teenwolf]

tangor:
Domain is pretty old, content is there, content is quality. Traffic from G and Y are decent. We are ranked #1 for some terms on both Y and G.

Something is amiss with Bing. Can't figure it out.

[ByronM]

Have you checked bing webmaster tools to see how your site is indexed?

[teenwolf]

I have:

- The site is authenticated
- Indexed pages: 2000+
- Domain score: (five bars)
- Top 5 pages: Only shows the home page!

- Crawl issues: none
- Backlinks: list seems normal
- Outbound Links: list seems normal

Any ideas? Totally confused.

[teenwolf]

I just received a tip submit an HTML sitemap instead of an XML sitemap. Anyone have experience with this or have any other thoughts about this?

[teenwolf]

OK, so no one has much to say. Let me ask this question, though:

So right now if you do a site:example.com search only our home page shows up on page 1 of results (only one result) but if you go to pages 2+ many other pages are there.

Has anyone seen this before? What could it possibly mean? Thanks for any suggestions.

[James_WV]

To be honest it may well just be that Bing provides very little traffic. This is a true example from our logs for last Month for a very competitive term:

Term: "location widgets"

No. Results: G.com 18,100,000; Bing.com 18,800,000

Position: G.com / .co.uk #1, Bing.com / .co.uk #1

Traffic: Google - 2814, Bing - 87

Like I say, this is a very competitive term with a lot of searches pm and a lot of results. We have #1 on G and Bing and have had for over a year (back when Bing was Live) - still getting less than 3% of our traffic for this term from Bing.

[davidof]

> To be honest it may well just be that Bing provides very little traffic.

I have similar figures to you. Well indexed in Bing but very few people searching in that space on the search engine.

[TheMadScientist]

I just received a tip submit an HTML sitemap instead of an XML sitemap. Anyone have experience with this or have any other thoughts about this?

Did you have any luck with this?

I took over a site a little bit ago, redesigned and structured it, looked at Bing's site results and saw 14 URLs... About a week ago I either 301ed, 410ed or 403ed the old pages that could be found in other engines where appropriate to get the out of the results and spidering. Then I submitted an XML Sitemap the way they say to and also included a link to it in the robots.txt, because I read this thread and figured I'd help them out a bit.

To date both Google and Yahoo have quit requesting the old locations (for the most part, they get one or two bad requests a day) and have both found the new XML Sitemap (I did not submit it to either of them, but did to Bing.)... MSNBot has requested 98 unique URLs even though they only list 14 using the site: operator and all they have done for the last 3 days, except for the 'odd request' is grab 'Gone' pages.

Too bad MSNBot doesn't recognize there's a Sitemap and restructuring going on, grab the Sitemap then spider those URLs instead of the ones they don't list as having. It seems kind of odd to me they would say, 'Help us find your pages... Here's how to do it...', then not use the method they suggest.

Really, if they used the XML Sitemap they say to create they'd find a really nice, well organized website but instead they insist on spidering URLs they don't even list as part of the site... I don't get it?

[TheMadScientist]

Update:

Although MSNBot has yet to request the XML Sitemaps I installed, it has quit requesting the other URLs. In fact it just stopped completely requesting those URLs 3 or 4 days ago, so that part is cool. Now I hope it gets the Sitemap I submitted and linked in the robots.txt to assist in find the additions that do not have a 301 pointing to them, because there are quite a few.

[TheMadScientist]

Update x 2:

MSNBot has yet to request the XML Sitemap I submitted, but went crazy (in a good way) on the site I'm referring to and is doing a great job of finding the new pages...