Bing Traffic drop

[loopyal]

Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th?

Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks.

100% white hat site

[RobertFisher]

Alan,

I haven't seen a significant traffic drop on Bing for any of our sites (say over 10%) I have seen some odd movements in rankings on Bing for the last few months. I am not sure what they are doing overall, but it is affecting some areas more than others (an example would be around automotive where one of our clients who had been at a rank of 2 to 15 on about 15 keywords for some time, all of a sudden fell to the 30s on several. No changes to site, etc. So, we will keep digging. It can happen when someone is new are something becomes hot for some reason, but until you keep digging and watching, you won't know. 
I am assuming you are not doing PPC of any kind, etc?
Have you looked at your sources of traffic to see what changed there?
Say on given terms are you getting a lot less traffic or has referral or direct traffic fallen off?

Hope it helps.

[loopyal]

Thank you Robert.

Because it is a big news site, things are always changing, but we haven't made any big changes.

no new major sources of referrals.

Most other traffic is relatively steady.

Direct calls slightly increasing.

We don't do any PPC

It isn't anything to do with terms, we don't really do that.

[RobertFisher]

Alan, if direct calls are slightly increasing but traffic is down, have you added a number to meta description, local seo, etc.?

[loopyal]

Sorry I don't know what you mean about adding a number?

We haven't changed anything other than continuing to add 30 to 50 stories per day.

No internal structure has changed. We don't do any "link building" - all our incoming links come from people linking to content on their own.

[RobertFisher]

What I was talking about is sometimes we will add a phone number in the meta description to see if people will call straight to that number from the query as opposed to necessarily clicking through. (also, return customers will use it to call you back on a quick search they do remembering you have a number there). When we do this we use a tracking number that rolls to their main line. Since we employ a different tracking number for every client & every item for that client we are able to get a better grasp as to what is actually going on. An example is an attorney here that we thought was somehow having traffic 'assigned' to a large media firm he was doing business with. When we put in the meta desc. change with a number.....Voila! We had the answer.

Probably not what you are doing, but it made me wonder if that would increase your calls, while lowering your traffic, even thought 50% drop could be a lot.

Best Alan

[loopyal]

OK I see what you mean, Robert - that is a great idea.

I'm a programmer too, so a call to me isn't a phone call, it is a call of a program, in this case a direct access - from someone who typed in the url or has the site bookmarked. I'm mixing up my nomenclature, sorry for the confusion.