Why Aren't My URLs Indexed In Bing?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I get about 80% of my traffic from google organic, and only about 4% of my traffic from bing.

I am not sure, but I BELIEVE it is because bing has only indexed about 14 of our 300 or so URLs. Google and Yahoo have them ALL indexed, as far as I can tell. (I am using the site:mydomain.com operator on bing and only get 14 results).

We have unique content and NO syndication content. It is an ecommerce site, but where we sell the same products as other sites, we have our own descriptions that we have written ourselves.

Is there something I should check for?

Thanks in advance.

[SEOPTI]

Check your crawl rate in Bing WMT. If it is not consistent increasing, your indexed URLs won't increase.

[Planet13]

Thanks SEOPTI:

Will check later tonight.

[bingdude]

Some quick thoughts:

1 - Yahoo organic search is powered by Bing, so if Yahoo has all the pages indexed and Bing doesn't, something is amiss. Post up the domain and I'll send it around tot he team internally here for a look see.

2 - as suggested, take a look at the crawl setting feature in the Webmaster Tools at Bing. YOU can set the desired crawl rate Bingbot follows. If you already set it, and it's set low, that's blocking Bingbot's ability to crawl fully.

3 - see this article [onlinehelp.microsoft.com] for a guide to successful indexing within Bing

4 - always keep in mind that Bing has a high quality standard. This means we don't keep every page we find on the internet in our index. Th eindex size is always growing, and regular purges of low-value content happen almost daily. Sites with thin content tend to not last long in our index. I'm NOT saying that's the issue here, but simply covering the base.

[achean]

Bingdude,

A while back I noticed that our site had an outdated/non-working sitemap on file in Bing Webmaster Tools. Seeking to correct the problem, I immediately replaced the old sitemap with the current/working one. However, there were some issues with some of the subfiles/links in the sitemap, which I think may have caused previously indexed pages to be dropped because our traffic from Bing/Yahoo instantly plummeted after many years of being fairly stable. Alarmed by the severity of the problem, I removed the new/problematic sitemap.

Since that time, there has been some small improvement in traffic levels, but they are still a small fraction of what they were. In addition, one key directory that used to get the most traffic, now gets virtually nothing from Bing. Any thoughts as to what may be going on an how I can address the problem? The timing made it clear that it was a direct result of the sitemap change, rather than any changes in the pages/content.

As an aside, does it make sense to jack the crawl settings up to the maximum if our site can handle it, or just 'let Bing decide'?

Thanks.

[Web_speed]

Hi Bingdude,

A question about sitemap xml submission.

I've submitted a website sitemap (xml) and two days later it still shows "pending" in WMT (no errors).

What should i read into this... in other words, how long it would normally take bing to read and crawl the URLs in the map?

I ask because i previously had a different sitemap.xml listed in WMT and it showd "pending" for weeks and weeks. I now deleted and replaced it with a double checked and validated new xml map (as well as delete the old xml from WMT and listed the new one with a diffrent name) but still get that "pending" msg also with the new validated map.

What would you recommend me doing ?

P.S.
Quality shop type eCommerce website selling electronic goods.

[John_Galt]

Hi, web speed. Here's a copy of a post I just made on the Bing WM forum:

Five year old site with 50 backlinks not found even by search for URL

My site example.com can not be found on Bing. It's five years old and has 50 back links according to Alexa. I get dozens of people finding my site through Google specificaly for searches for my domain name but such a search on Bing yields only pages from other sites which reference my site. Google sends me lots of traffic for other terms too, but at this point I'd be happy if Bing would simply list my site as a result for people searching for it by domain name.

I established a Bing webmaster account in April 2011 and submitted URLs. No luck. I submitted a site map in August 2011, no luck. Resubmitted sitemap several time. Latest copy submitted October 19 which is still pending.

I sent an email to Bing support but got a boilerplate response which suggested I do the things I have already done without success.

Can anyone help?

[SEOPTI]

You can feed the engine with 50 URLs per domain per month, submitted URLs will be indexed within 24 hours.

[John_Galt]

"You can feed the engine with 50 URLs per domain per month, submitted URLs will be indexed within 24 hours."

Not in my case. Six months and still waiting.

[Staffa]

"feed the engine with 50 URLs per domain per month"

I have been watching Bing/Google crawl one of my sites; ca 3,600 pages, so at 50 URLs per month Bing would manage to crawl the whole site in ..... 72 months or 6 years !

As yet, Google has crawled the whole site more than once, Bing maybe 10 % of it.

October crawl results :

Bingbot
Robots.txt : 36
Pages : 28

Googlebot
Robots.txt : 38
Pages : 1013

Bing, get your skates on !

[tangor]

Oddly enough, I see a near inverse... Google indexes FEWER of one site's 1800 pages (900+) and Bing has 1700+. The + is for event pages that come and go. Merely a comment not an answer... as I have no clue!

[SEOPTI]

Only a few quality relevant (on-topic) links are needed with Bing and they will crawl large volumes. Don't use off-topic links, it's a wate of time.

Look into your backlink report in their WMT, you will see the most valuable links which point to your site. Promote your backlinks which are not listed their and force Bing to list them, make your listed inbound links even stronger by backlinking them.

The main difference is, Goog will index and keep crap, Bing will index some crap but in moste cases quality and drop the crap over time (usage metrics), so check your site quality.

[John_Galt]

I have on topic links leading to the site in question. That site is not listed in Bing. I have abandoned sites with one off topic link from another site I own. These abandoned sites are listed in Bing.

There have to be other factors at play because simply getting a few on topic links does not necessarily lead to indexing by Bing.

Is it too much to ask that Bing list my site "example.com" at least when folks search for the term "example.com?" Instead of listing my site Bing lists other sites with fewer links than mine which mention my site. That makes no sense at all from the user satisfaction point of view.