Drop in number of pages in Bing index

[GBC]

I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100.

We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file.

Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?

[SebastianCowie]

Hi Rory,

As I don't have access to the site URL or tools there's only so much help I can give, but what I would suggest is that you start by analysing the data within Bing webmaster tools and see if there are any issues within there!

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

[irvingw]

Something has got to be unintentionally blocking Bing.

Post your site if you're comfortable with it and we'll take a look. Don't take the dev teams word for it take a look at your robots.txt first. If you're blocking Bing you also could be blocking Google to so I would hop on this right away.

[GBC]

Hi Sebastian and Irving - thanks for the help. Our site is www.greatbritishchefs.com - check it our if you like to cook!

It was really strange as I started to test it out more by searching for other non-brand terms such as 'beef recipes' and Bing was still only returning 40 results. Cleared cookies and am now seeing full results again. Very strange!

Thanks again for answering

Rory

[irvingw]

You're good! Even more pages indexed in Bing.

Google: 2,190 results

Bing: 3,390 results

If you haven't already, signup for Bing Webmaster Tools and verify your site. Bing has some really good tools on there and it's a must for an SEO now just like Google Webmaster Tools insight is. That will show you index status and other issues more accurately. Good luck

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster