14 replies to this topic

[btreloar]

Website [removed] has fine rankings in Google but none in Yahoo or Bing.

 

Pages are being crawled but in Bing Webmaster Tools Pages Indexed has been zero for months and Appeared In Search has been zero for many months as well.

 

The site is healthy, has been around a long time and has a robots.txt file and successfully submitted XML sitemap added a few months ago. Pages have description meta tags and rank well in Google.

 

The Bing Webmaster Tools SEO Reports section says "Congratulations! We’ve found no issues on your site this time."

 

Oher sites hosted on the same server rank well in Yahoo and Bing so it shouldn't be an IP address problem.

 

Same problem plagues another website owned by the same business, [removed]

 

 

How can I figure out what Yahoo and Bing don't like about these sites?

Edited by Jill, 18 January 2013 - 10:38 AM.
Websites removed as per forum rules

[SelfMade]

Bing like Keyword stuffing.

 

I know it's not correct to say it. But they do.

 

You need to practically have at least 5% keyword density to rank on there.

[btreloar]

The problem is not ranking well, but rather about not being there at all. In a search for the company names, which match the domain names, neither one shows up in the first 100 results. Bing Webmaster Tools reports Pages Indexed as zero.

[SelfMade]

The site is healthy, has been around a long time and has a robots.txt file

 

Well seeing as nobody else is suggesting anything, I would suggest you look at what's in that robots.txt file.

 

Maybe there is code in there blocking the Bing bot or whatever....

 

Just to try and help somehow.

[piskie]

Checking the robots.txt file is of course a good thing to do. Easy to rule out and/or easy to rectify.

 

However the other suggestion of resorting to Keyword Stuffing is definitely not a good idea. Even if it did improve Bing and Yahoo SERPs, it would in all likelihood kill off much of your Google traffic. I for one would never risk jeopardising Google SERPs in pursuant of other SEs.

 

If your content is written well and describes products or services etc in a way that is fulfilling the requirements of the searcher, it will automatically be a good and relevant answer to search queries.

 

Check page coding and structures to make sure there are no unintended Black or Grey issues and correct any that you feel are doubtful/dubious. Remember that is a variable yardstick and what wasn't a problem 5 years ago may now be on the dodgy side and picked out by Algorithms.

[chrishirst]

By the way, Yahoo and Bing are one and the same, and have been for over three years.

You need to practically have at least 5% keyword density to rank on there

 

Oh please,  the key word density crap has been dead a long time now!

[SelfMade]

Oh please,  the key word density crap has been dead a long time now!

 

You don't know that it IS dead equally I don't know that it ISN'T.

 

You seem quite certain about things

[chrishirst]

Some things are very easy to disprove.

[btreloar]

Ok  — no keyword sgtuffing, no gray hat SEO techniques, and some good rankings in Google; no Panda or Penguin loss of rankings.   They have the simplest robots.text file possible:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The domain name is the same as the company name, and even a search for THAT brings up nothing in Yahoo and Bing anywhere in the top ten pages. It's as if this domain has been banned from Yahoo & Bing and I'm stumped as to why. Bing Webmaster Tools shows it's being crawled, but that's about it.

[qwerty]

Is Bing crawling and not indexing, or not even crawling? And have you submitted an XML sitemap to them?

[btreloar]

Hi, Qwerty —

 

Bing is crawling: Pages crawled = 155 this period, 2098 last period. Pages Indexed = 0.

 

We got a message that the site wasn't crawled because of a missing robots.txt file, so we fixed that immediately.

 

Bing Webmaster tools reports last XML sitemap submitted 3/5/2012, last crawled 1/25/2013, scored "Success".

 

I don't know what else to do.

[qwerty]

Bing specifically told you that the absence of a robots.txt was a reason not to crawl the site? That's weird. Lots of sites have no robots file, either because the site owner doesn't have any idea of what it is, or they have no desire to block any spiders. The default action of a search engine spider is to crawl and index anything it finds. Robots.txt is only needed if you want to specifically block that activity on some or all of your pages.

[btreloar]

I was shocked to see that in the client's Bing Webmaster Tools messages myself. I've since added robots.txt files for all my clients, even iuf most of them are just a 2-line file that allows everything.

 

Admittedly, I've never seen that before or since, but the message was very clear and unambiguous. It vasically said they were unable to crawl the site because they couldn;t find the robots.txt file.

 

But that's clearly not the problem with this site anymore; I added their robots.txt file a couple of months ago.

 

Checking Bing Webmaster Tools just now, it says for "this period" there have been 226 pages crawled and 0 pages indexed.

[qwerty]

I'm sure you must have checked this, but I guess I have to ask: could the pages have meta robots tags containing "noindex"?

 

Other than that, all I can think of is suggesting you try entering some of the URLs into SEO Browser. If there's a problem with the way the pages are coded, a bot might not see any content when it crawls a page, and SEO Browser might catch that. It won't tell you exactly what the problem is, but at least you'll know it isn't Bing's fault.

 

Similarly, you might try the SEOmoz toolset (you can use it for free on a limited number of URLs). I had a problem with some code spiders couldn't read about a year ago, and found out when I ran the pages through on their tools. At first, I thought the problem was on moz' end, but it turned out their tool was having the same problem search engines were.

[btreloar]

Thanks, Qwery. I missed the notification of your reply and just saw it. There are no "noindex" tags in the code on either of these two sites. And they have some terrific rankings in Google, so clearly both sites are spiderable.

 

I'll check SEO Browser and SEOmoz Toolset ASAP.