Clients asks: How long till on Bing and Yahoo?

[StephBertha]

Hi there,

One of my clients had asked me how long it would take for his site to get up on Yahoo and Bing. He's currently on Google, but those other search engines are lagging.

It's been a week or so since his site launched, but I'm not sure what to tell him as I don't really know much about Yahoo and Bing.

[RyanKent]

Bing provides Yahoo search data so if you are in one, you will be in the other and vice versa.

There are many factors involved which can affect when your site is indexed by Bing and if your site is indexed. Here are some steps you can take to help:

• open an account with Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not already.

• upload a sitemap directly via your Bing WMT account

• use the Submit URLs to add your home page

• ensure you have not blocked your site in robots.txt for the Bing crawler

• ensure your pages do not have the noindex tag. Since you are indexed in Google it seems this concern does not apply to you

Bing is a lot more selective then Google when it comes to indexing sites. There are a variety of issues which can negatively impact your site being indexed:

• ensure your site maps are all pages you want indexed. It should not contain any 404 errors or redirected URLs

• try to use valid code on your site. While Google is willing to work around many coding errors, Bing seems more selective. You can use Microsoft's IIS tool to check your site for violations. Otherwise try to ensure your site can be crawled cleanly and has minimal or no validation errors.

• if your site and it's pages are linked to by authoritative sites, it will increase the speed and likelihood of your pages being indexed

[StephBertha]

This response is GREAT! Thank you! I'm going to do those things right now.