Questions
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Google Has Indexed Most of My Site, why won't Bing?
How much time has passed since you submitted your sitemap to Bing? I am not sure about other SEO specialists, but I don't spend my time on Bing/Yahoo. As far as I know they have less than 30% of the search market together. I would rather allocate my time on moving more pages of my website to the 1st page of Google. If you are still concerned about being indexed on Bing try to compare your website with your competitors (who are on Bing of course). See how many pages they have indexed. See if you can get the same backlinks. See what robots.txt they have. (Maybe the problem is in it.) See if your site has any errors. See if your site is banned from Bing for some reason. The underscored points are those I would check first. Warmest regards, Slava
Technical SEO Issues | | SlavaRybalka0 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
I hate to advocate full-scale blocking, but if you really took a hit, and you know the timeline coincided with the new content, it is possible. It might be better to scale back and re-roll out new content in chunks. One warning - if this is a regular filter (you added a bunch of duplicates), Google should start re-ranking content as soon as the blocking kicks in (this may take weeks, not days). If this was Panda-related or more severe, though, it could take a month or more to see an impact. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but don't Robots.txt block the pages for 2 days, decide it didn't work, and unblock them. A slightly less extreme approach would be to META NOINDEX all of the pages. That way, you could start to selectively lift the NOINDEX on content piece by piece. If you Robots.txt block all the new directories, it's going to be hard to re-introduce the content. You'll end up releasing the block all at once and potentially just having the same problem again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dr-Pete0 -
Duplicate content
Hi James If you have reason to believe that your website has received a penalty from Google, then I'd suggest submitting a Reconsideration Request once you're sure that your website no longer violates any of Google's guidelines, such as excessive duplicate content in your case, going by what you've described. It sounds as though your traffic levels have dropped as a result of significant drops in ranking. There are two main types of penalty; 'Algorithmic Penalties' and 'Manual Penalties'. If you received an Algorithmic Penalty (more common of the two) then your rankings will start to improve anyway, once some time has passed since you rectified your issue with duplicate content and have added value to your website. If you received a Manual Penalty (less likely for duplicate content issues though certainly still possible) then a Reconsideration Request would be worth a try. So once all is great & healthy again with your website (which it could be already) then decide whether or not to submit a reconsideration request based on how much time has passed since you believe you received a penalty and rectified the suspected issue. If you feel enough time has passed and your rankings haven't started to improve, then go for it. Hope that helps, Regards Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimonCullum0