Microsoft's Test With Yahoo Remind Webmasters To Get Into Bing's Index

[engine]

Bing Tests With Yahoo Remind Webmasters To Get Into Bing's Index [bing.com]

For webmasters, it’s important to be familiar with how the Bing crawler interacts with your site. After the full algorithmic transition is complete, you only need to optimize for one crawler (Bing), as we will provide Yahoo! with results from our index.


During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results.

In particular, now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition.

[BillyS]

After years of zero traffic from Bing, we actually do better in Bing than Yahoo. The selfish me thinks the switch is great. The selfless me knows this is not good for search.

[arizonadude]

The selfless me knows this is not good for search.

And exactly how is finally a contender to Google not good?

Now they have 30% of market share and climbing, Google will have to take notice and maybe just maybe stop their arrogant attitude towards searchers and webmasters alike.

If that's not good for search, I don't know what is.

[ken_b]

...it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo! and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make ...

Here's some feedback.... When you have both last years page info and this years page info, try showing this years when people search for it.

[BillyS]

And exactly how is finally a contender to Google not good?

I'm not sure why one contender is better than two. I hope you're not trying to say that the only way Bing can improve is by buying market share. Certainly MS has the financial resources to take a run at Google without Yahoo at its side.

I'd say the defeat of Yahoo is a major victory for Google. With Yahoo out of the way, they can concentrate one player - Bing.

As mentioned earlier, we do fine on all three engines - so the selfish me could care less. (I also own shares of MS stock... so that means I like the company.) The defeat of Yahoo is not good for search.

[koan]

maybe just maybe stop their arrogant attitude towards searchers and webmasters alike.

Could you make at least one post that isn't about trashing Google? It gets repetitive.

Personally I'm not happy with Bing taking over Yahoo!'s search as I always did well with Yahoo! and Google, but Bing crawler has always been rather weak, picking only a small percentage of the pages of my sites.

Hopefully this thread will give webmasters a few tips to perform better with Bing, now that it kind of matters.

[tangor]

Wonder why Bing is not finding pages? My experience is Bing finds more than Slurp or Googlebot ever did. And more efficiently. That said, I'm not marketing with Bing... yet, so can't speak to that side of things. But I do know that Bing does a better job indexing my sites than Y or G ever did. Just my 2cents.

[maximillianos]

Does Bing accept the same sitemap format as Google? I tried to find information on the format, but only found references to logon to their Webmaster Tools to get info, which I cannot do since I am on a Linux laptop.

I currently have both a "list" style and XML style sitemaps for Google. The list style sitemap(s) are for my regular site pages, and the XML sitemap(s) are for my mobile pages.

I'm hoping both formats are compatible with Bing to save some rework.

Thanks for any info!

[burnseo]

One of our sites has been losing indexed pages in Bing, whereas in other search engines are increasing. We have lost traffic, too, significantly. With the upcoming Yahoo! / Bing integration, we're worried about losing traffic coming from Yahoo! organic listings (we're already seeing a decreased on traffic from Yahoo!) We troubleshooted the site and everything looks okay. Any ideas or recommendations to address this issue are welcome. Thanks!

[Go60Guy]

One would have to assume that, once the switchover occurs, searchers using Yahoo will continue, at least initially, using Yahoo. So, in theory, Bing traffic should increase. Whether that will translate into organic search traffic for individual sites equivalent to what Yahoo was yielding could be anybody's guess.

Also, the article refers to "Bingbot". I don't recall ever seeing a crawl by Bingbot, just msnbot. Am I missing something?

[Leonard0]

the article refers to "Bingbot". I don't recall ever seeing a crawl by Bingbot, just msnbot. Am I missing something?

msnbot will change to bingbot on Oct 1
[bing.com...]

On October 1st, 2010, we will drop the beta designation from the Bing crawler and change the name of the crawler to reflect Microsoft's new brand for search. Instead of the old msnbot 2.0b showing up in your server logs, the updated user agent will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

The HTTP header From field will also change as shown below:

From: msnbot(at)microsoft.com

will become

From: bingbot(at)microsoft.com

Robots Exclusion Protocol directives precedence

We want webmasters to know that bingbot will still honor robots.txt directives written for msnbot, so no change is required to your robots.txt file(s).

[CainIV]

I'd say the defeat of Yahoo is a major victory for Google. With Yahoo out of the way, they can concentrate one player - Bing.

I don't think Google has seen Yahoo as any sort of a threat - literally for years. Internal issues have consumed that company, and an ongoing series of poor search results was the telltale story.

I think Google has had their eye on Bing for a while, and in my opinion, one solid competitor is better than two next-to-useless players.