Bing's indexed pages vs pages appearing in results

[brandonRT]

Hi all

We're trying to increase our efforts in ranking for our keywords on Bing, and I'm discovering a few unexpected challenges. Namely, Bing is reporting 16000+ pages have been crawled... yet a site:mywebsite.com search on Bing shows less than 1000 results.

I'm aware that Duane Forrester has said they don't want to show everything, only the best. If that's the case, what factors must we consider most to encourage Bing's engine to display most if not all of the pages the crawl on my site?

I have a few ideas of what may be turning Bing off so to speak (some duplicate content issues, 301 redirects due to URL structure updates), but if there's something in particular we should monitor and/or check, please let us know. We'd like to prioritize

Thanks!

[brandonRT]

I believe I've found the solution - as recently as 2009, Bing was only crawling one sitemap per website. It also said Bing would only crawl the most recently submitted sitemap but it doesn't appear that was the case for our site.

So I've since removed the old sitemap and am waiting to see some evidence of our new sitemap being crawled and indexed.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Brandon,

Just wanted to check in - did using 1 sitemap work?

Kristina

[brandonRT]

Hey Kristina

It has not unfortunately.

Bing reports successful crawls, however it's not crawling it - at all.

After reading more about Bing's sitemap preferences, there are a few things left to try. I'm using this post on Bing's forums http://www.bing.com/blogs/webmaster/f/12248/t/659635.aspx#9602607 as a reference for now. We're going to make a temporary separate sitemap for Bing to test what is suggested in that link. Hopefully something sticks and we can make some progress going forward!

Brandon

[KristinaKledzik]

Good luck!

If these tips don't work, you should follow up here again, but include a little more information about your site. It's possible that Bing IS crawling all of your pages properly, but something about them is making Bing think that they aren't valuable enough to be in their indexes. I'd particularly look to see if:

• Content seems to be duplicate, either within your site or if it's duplicated elsewhere
• Content is extremely thin (less than 100 words on a page/no unique text above the fold)
• Content is unreadable by Bing: check the cached version of a page that's not indexed and make sure you can read the unique content

Hope this helps! I'm going to mark this question as "answered," only because if you have a follow up question, it'll probably be more specific now that you have more information, and I'd like all of that info to be included in the original question.

Best,

Kristina

[brandonRT]

Just an update:

Bing reported a successful crawl after submitting a new one, then rejected it based on an error that it didn't describe. Took it down, made a change to URL itself (somehow the .gz extension wasn't there) and resubmitted on 7/7/13.

Since then, Bing has reported a successful crawl, then reported a successful crawl on 6/30/13 (7 days before submission?), then reported a failed crawl on 7/5/13 (2 days before submission?) and now today again reporting a successful crawl on 7/7/13.

So my question now is... does Bing keep record of historically submitted sitemaps and confuse them with new submissions of the same ones? I've yet to see Bing actually index what's in the sitemaps, as a site: operator search is still a daily fluctuation between 1200 and 3300 results, sometimes going up to 4400. But again, this is daily. Right now, searching site:roadtrippers.com on Bing reports 4,420 results. Later today, I imagine it'll be around 3,300 or 1,200.

Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated.

[KristinaKledzik]

I haven't heard of Bing keeping historically submitted sitemaps and confusing them, although I know that they're very picky about the number of inaccuracies they find in a sitemap, so it's possible they keep the latest one around so they can refer to it if the current one seems to have holes.

That said - when you search for your site, are the same pages coming up on the first page? What about the second? Third? The number of pages that come up when you search for site:mysite.com are approximations and can vary even as you scroll through the results pages. The more important question is, how many pages does Bing say are indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools?

[brandonRT]

Hello again Kristina

Bing's showing 38,885 pages indexed... and I've noticed the amount of pages vary after clicking through several pages.

So I guess the problem isn't why aren't they indexing, but rather why aren't they showing all pages. I'd assume this is related to page quality (content, on-page ranking factors, etc)?

[KristinaKledzik]

Yep, if Bing Webmaster Tools doesn't show problems with the sitemap, I'd focus on the points I highlighted back in mid-June on this thread (make content robust, unique, and make sure text is in HTML).

Good luck,

Kristina