Flux in Bing/Yahoo search rankings?

[ted-zarceczny]

Has anyone else noticed any flux in Bing/Yahoo desktop search rankings in the start of March?

Our weekly MSN search traffic was steady and then starting dropping off around March 3 or 4. Weekly desktop traffic now down about 20%

Anyone see anything similar or have any resources for learning more about this?

[RyanPurkey]

I haven't seen this Ben. And you're still doing fine in Google? Have you checked Google Trends in relation to your content? Did your robots.txt file change?  Is your site in Bing Webmaster Sites? https://www.bing.com/webmaster/ Just a few of the things to check on. Cheers!

[SEO-Buzz]

Yes, Ben, I have seen this and it was very pronounced on one of the websites I support. Rankings for Google remained, shifting a little bit due to some technical and content SEO changes. The shifting in Google was desired. However Bing/Yahoo dropped all keyword rankings that we are following. From many to zero in one week. And, the sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools has been pending for 2 weeks now. Although concerned, I figured this was a response to the elimination of duplicate content from technical SEO changes, onpage optimization changes (from none or accidental to well-optimiized), and a change of address on a Bing listing that did not go through completely on Bing Local the first time. So, yes, the Bing/Yahoo drop in early March happened on a a few sites I monitor, and were very pronounced on one site that was undergoing many changes.   After waiting 2-3 weeks for things to index/deindex naturally with all search engines, this week, I submitted URLs to Bing Webmasters Tools looking for some ranking relief. Next step is to do some deep page linking to try to influence having more pages crawled by Bing.  I would be interested to hear others' experiences.

[KaneJamison]

I just scanned through 20-30 sites of various traffic/content models and I don't see anything major on any of them, but that doesn't mean you're not seeing something specific happening.

If I were you I would check into Bing Webmaster Tools data and see what they can tell you about recent changes to crawling or visibility to see if there's a signal there that you can look into further.

[SEO-Buzz]

Hi, Kane. I went through every setting and data page on Bing Webmasters. The only thing odd is that the sitemap has been sitting there "pending" for a couple of weeks. Hopefully the URL submits with jostle something good loose. Bing may be very confused because my clients had a website they had tried to do themselves and there were http and https pages mixed together and orphan pages and template placeholder posts like "hello world". So some radical surgery was performed to resolve the SEO issues...along with content changes. So Bing could just be in a bit of a shock. I have seen lesser changes make rankings suffer for a while before. So I am not sure either if this is due to a systemic Bing change or due to our actions taken on the site. Thanks for responding!

[KaneJamison]

That's all interesting. Didn't mean to suggest you needed to look at BWT (sounds like you have quite a bit already), I meant to reiterate that Benjamin should look there. I rarely spend any time in BWT so I can't say much about its response times and error rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has delays or takes awhile to sort out big site changes.

Hope it trends well for you and please report back if you see any developments. I'm curious what Benjamin sees on the backend of BWT as well.

[ted-zarceczny]

I looked in Bing Webmaster Tools and it definitely looked like something funky was going on.

We still use http on our site, but Bing was picking up a flawed https version of the home page. I had the tech team redirect https to http using a 301. When I fetched with Bingbot, it initially returned an error. After a couple of re-tries, though, it worked fine. Very strange. I submitted the URL for bing to re-crawl.

I imagine this has something to do with it, although I can't say exactly how.

Another funky thing: Almost all of our Bing/Yahoo traffic is from one keyword. According to Bing Webmaster tools, we rank the same for that keyword after the drop in traffic as we did before. Maybe there has been a change to Bing/Yahoo SERPs?

[KaneJamison]

If all of the traffic is one keyword, then a minor interface change could cause a big traffic change. Any new ad units or stuff like that showing up that wasn't there before in the SERP?

There's been flux lately from the Firefox partnership, but seems unlikely for you to notice that trickle down.

I assume you saw no change on mobile or tablet, just desktop?

[ted-zarceczny]

Yes, just desktop. And the change happened across multiple browsers, not just Firefox.

I hadn't used Bing in a while but when I tested it out after the drop seems like there's way more ads that I remember there being before. (Of course, that's not the most scientific of observations.)

[dcmike]

I have likewise noticed this on several sites - that do very well in Google. Some sites were near or at the top of Yahoo page one have fallen suddenly &  drastically!

Specifically, two smaller (what I call) "magnet sites" or "satellite sites", tuned to narrow band topics, and linked to the main site which also contained those topics. They were both number one, page one - and beat the main, large site on their topic.

The net result is the two magnet sites fell back but Yahoo made the "mother-ship" number one in both categories. They "givith and taketh away".

I too noticed a large increase in ad-space real estate. Since there's so much less room for organic results, they are obviously quashing multiple SERPS from the same outfits. I have noticed a similar result in Google years back - a satellite site will virtually disappear, but the main site goes to number one.