Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing

[tdawson09]

Hi all,

I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google.

Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index.

Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, here is my question - how can you be sure that traffic from Bing is related to sitemaps resubmission? How about, simply, rankings? Or one of tons of other reasons?