Cannot Get Indexed on Yahoo or Bing

[anefarious1]

I have a quality website, no SEO tricks, millions upon millions of pageviews from Google yet Bing will not give me traffic. I have tried numerous times to contact Bing support but they don't bother to write back.

To be clear, my website sort of gets crawled by Bing (somewhat) and they give like 5 impressions here and there but basically it is being ignored.

Anyone have any suggestions or contacts for me? Thank you!

[engine]

What indication do you get from Bing Webmaster Tools [bing.com...]

[NickMNS]

I have a similar experienced with Bing, I get a hand full of users each day but that is it. When I first started I created an account for Bing webmaster tools but the tools sucked and didn't help me get any traffic from bing. So I gave up and removed any validation code from my site.

[lucy24]

You've been crawled, so that's the first thing. Have you been indexed? Try some exact-text searches to verify that your pages come up.

Also check your server access logs for not-quite-human requests coming in from standard Bing crawl ranges using these two exact UAs:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0;  Trident/5.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0;  Trident/5.0)
(note the extra space). About 1/3 of these requests will have a bing referer including search terms. This is a nifty way to see what kinds of searches lead to your site coming up in bing.

Bing and Yahoo are large, but they don't profess to have the entire internet indexed. Sometimes it depends on your exact content, in ways you can't control: some humans use G###, while other humans prefer a different search engine. If your content happens to appeal to humans who happen to prefer G, you simply won't get visitors from bing and yahoo.

[NickMNS]

For myself I see the bingbot in my logs quite a lot, generally less than Google, Baidu and Yandex but still present on a daily basis.

If your content happens to appeal to humans who happen to prefer G, you simply won't get visitors from bing and yahoo.

What you suggest may makes sense to some degree, for example I would expect b2b type websites to perform better given that Windows/Office machines are used in the majority of the office environments, so use of Edge and Bing being it's default SE. IE + Edge account for about 3% of my total traffic.

What do those with more traffic from Bing have as % of IE/Edge users?

And! does Bing traffic drive IE/Edge users or does IE/Edge users drive users to use Bing?

[anefarious1]

If I type my website address (URL) into Bing the website doesn't even show up. My Facebook page is listed as #2 but not the actual website. If I can't correspond with Bing then how should I proceed? It's pathetic. No wonder Bing has no traction against Google.

[keyplyr]

If I type my website address (URL) into Bing the website doesn't even show up

Doing that is no indication if your site is indexed.

Typing your URL into any search box will only return pages that have that URL mentioned in the page content.

Follow the link that Engine gave you in the 2nd post. Use those tools to see which pages are indexed by Bing.

[anefarious1]

My website is being crawled but not indexed. See this screenshot of inside Bing Webmaster:

[imgur.com...]

[martinibuster]

Are you using a firewall, like Securi or WordFence?

[Mark_A]

Interesting thread, going to have a nose around Bing resources myself, we don't get as much as we should from Bing organic.

[anefarious1]

No firewall and no security plugin. I did switch to SSL recently but BING wasn't giving me any love before the switch either. Anyone know how to tell BING of a switch to SSL? or should I delete the property and start over? I guess I could try that.

[not2easy]

I would think that you would need to tell them about your new site after a change to https, same as Google.

[keyplyr]

@anefarious1- There is no tool in Bing Webmaster Tools [bing.com] to switch to HTTPS like there is in Google.

Bingbot just discovers the new paths by crawling and being redirected by your 301 code.

It does speed up the process if you submit an updated sitemap.xml.

[lucy24]

Anyone know how to tell BING of a switch to SSL

Hm, good question. Now that you mention it, I realize that I never did tell Bing my personal site went https in, er, ahem, May of last year.

:: scurrying off to do so, taking notes as I go along ::

On the wmt page, My Sites, there's an option for adding a site. But entering the https version of an existing http site doesn't change anything, so possibly bing--unlike Google--treats them all as one lump anyway. They currently list two sitemaps, http and https, both crawled recently. (No, I don't know why the http sitemap is listed as “Success” when in fact it returns a redirect to https. Perhaps the microsoft corporation has its own idiosyncratic definition of success.) The Inbound Links area also shows URLs in https form, even though I have only just this minute (literally) told them I'm https.

Tentative conclusion: You don't need to tell them anything. They know.

[keyplyr]

@anefarious1- From that image above, I agree that there is an issue stopping your pages from being accessible in the Bing index or else you would have traffic reported.

What does the Bing Webmaster Tools errors say? What do your server's error logs say?

[anefarious1]

where can I view the errors? The menu on the left hand side is a bunch worthless empty non-data as far as I can see (especially if you're me)

[keyplyr]

BWT > Diagnostics & Tools > Fetch as Bingbot

BWT > Reports & Data > Crawl Information

[anefarious1]

I don't see any errors when I use Fetch as Bingbot to fetch an example URL

Crawl information > HTTP 400-499 codes

I see only 2 errors, 1 an image URL and 1 of a URL that never existed.

If I upload a sitemap (don't have one) how would that help? Search engines don't need a sitemap. I ask because I can't think of anything else.

This website gets over 10,000 pageviews each day from Google. Bing is so incompetent.

[martinibuster]

Have you checked Archive.org to see if the domain has been used in a different context in the distant past?

Is there anything in your robots.txt that could accidentally be blocking Bing?

[lucy24]

This thread is getting long. Did you, at any point, try some exact-text searches on bing and yahoo to verify that your pages have been indexed?

[anefarious1]

The domain has never been misused in any way. Google loves it, going on 6+ years now.

I'm not blocking any regular post (WP) content in my robots.txt file.

I tried exact match phrases on Bing using quotation marks but it seems Bing doesn't acknowledge this technique...

Because I get a long list of websites which I know don't have this exact phrase. In any case, my website doesn't appear at all.

I guess we are nearing the end of this thread without any solution. After thinking it over, I could understand why Bing doesn't care. The fact is...

By indexing my website, and others like it, they are actually helping Google more than Microsoft due to Google's dominance in the ad market. Bing is a joke.

[martinibuster]

anefarious1, I'm fairly confident it's not Bing's fault.

There is a reason. I urge you to keep trying to figure it out because there is something wrong but I'm certain it's not on Bing's side.

The reason I'm certain is because in my experience Bing has been very good at indexing and ranking sites based on content, better imo than Google.

Google's reluctance to let go of the link signal has been it's strength and it's weakness. Bing's reliance on links has been less. Google's made some strides in the past two years, though.

I initially thought of a firewall or an anti-bot software because some of them focus on keeping the site open to Google. But configured incorrectly that kind of software can end up blocking Bing (because it's a bot).

You're robots.txt is probably fine, but... just to be sure, you may wish to have someone you know and trust review it for a reality check.

[anefarious1]

I'm willing to pay someone to get my website indexed on Bing. There is nothing else I can do.

[RhinoFish]

Grab a Bing Ads account, run $50 worth of ads, if your quality scores looks poor, contact Bing to resolve it.

[Leosghost]

It is amazingly difficult to not be indexed in Bing even for those of us who have in the past said uncomplimentary things about Bill G and Steve B, and more recently Satya N, normally a single link from any site ( great or small ) will get you into Bing's index..or even no link at all, they'll come around and crawl anyway..

So ..something must be misconfigured somewhere on your site, or server..

[Mark_A]

Our site is indexed alright, but it does not rank well, pages that do well in Google don't rank at all well in Bing. Well very little of ours seems to rank well in Bing.

[Leosghost]

Ranking well ( as in being #1 for multiple searches, with multiple sites, in multiple languages ) in Bing is not hard either, in my experience ..

[lucy24]

I tried exact match phrases on Bing using quotation marks but it seems Bing doesn't acknowledge this technique

Yes, if anyone can find a place where bing explains search operators or custom search (by any name) please tell us about it. That being said: I tried some phrases in quotation marks, and in every case the earliest hits were in fact for that exact phrase, whether they were treating it as exact text or not.

Furthermore: Even though I couldn't find Search Hints of any kind, I tried

"exact phrase here" site:example.com

and got results. Not for the exact phrase, although I know for a fact it occurs on the site, but results were constrained to the specified site. So they do recognize the syntax even if they won't admit to it. (Or maybe they recognized "example.com" and just ignored the "site" part. I guess it comes out the same either way.)

pages that do well in Google don't rank at all well in Bing

Seems like this would have to mean the converse too: pages that bing does admire don't necessarily do well in Google. After all, something has to rank well in Bing; they don't give you a blank SERP. It's like grades on an exam: even if nobody scored above 70%, somebody will still have the highest score and rank as no. 1.

[NickMNS]

I tried a "site:" search on bing and came up with results specific to the domain entered. Then I tried it with only the domain and no "site:" prefix and the results were similar but included other domains such as fb and twitter.

I share Mark_A's situation, my sites is indexed to some extent by Bing but I get very little traffic, so I don't rank.

[RhinoFish]

"my sites is indexed to some extent by Bing but I get very little traffic, so I don't rank."
Or B doesn't have much traffic.

If you calculate the (Google Organic) / (Bing Organic) ratio, where you at?