Is it normal for Bing rankings to fluctuate so much on a daily basis?

[Tinhat]

Hi all,

I launched a new website in Aug 2015, and have had some success with ranking organically on Google (position 2 - 5 for all of my target terms). However I'm still not getting any traction on Bing.

I know that they use completely different algorithms so it's not unusual to rank well on one but not the other, but the ranking behaviour that I see seems quite odd. We've been bouncing in and out of the top 50 for quite some time, with shifts of 30+ positions often on a daily basis (see attached). This seems to be the case for our full range of target terms, and not just the most competitive ones.

I'm hoping someone can advise on whether this is normal behaviour for a relatively young website, or if it more likely points to an issue with how Bing is crawling my site. I'm using Bing Webmaster tools and there aren't any crawl or sitemap issues, or significant seo flags.

Thanks

dhYgh

[seanginnaw]

Hi there,

Has your website been penalized before in any way? Sometimes where a disavow file has been applied to Google, some webmasters don't also apply this to Bing which can sometimes cause disparity between the two.

Yes, you're right that Bing has a different algorithm and crawling schedule but more often than not, rankings between the two are pretty similar. Is there anything in your robots.txt file that blocks bingbot?

Hope this helps,

Sean

[Tinhat]

Hi Sean,

Never had a penalty and no robots.txt issues, but thanks for the response.

Joe

[BlueCorona]

Hi Joe,

The ranking factors are not appreciably different for Bing/Yahoo than for Google, but you will always see some disparity between them. One suggestion I would offer is make sure you are as diligent with your Bing Business Listing as you are with Google. Otherwise, look at those ranking ahead of you and see what they are doing you are not, then see if you can manipulate a page to rise in the rankings.

Another thing to do would be to use Bing Webmaster Tools like you are probably using Google Analytics. This will surely provide some insights into which pages are rankings and which ones might need to be tweaked for Bing.