Bing And 301 Redirects, Do they just not get the concept? Options

[qwerty]

I published a test page to my site earlier this week, so I've been checking in all the engines to see when it gets indexed. While I was looking a few minutes ago, I noticed something odd in the results of a site: search on Bing. One of the results was the following:

#30. www.raisemyrank.com
www.raisemyrank.com/link-building.htm
Cached page

I used to have a page at that URL, but I moved it more than four years ago. I checked in WebBug, and sure enough, a request for the URL returns a 301 to the (not at all) new URL. Four years and they haven't picked it up yet?

Just for kicks, I thought I'd click the cached link to see what Bing thinks is at the old URL, and here's what I got:

Moved Permanently
The document has moved here.
Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.5 Server at www.raisemyrank.com Port 80

The word "here" is, of course, linked to the correct URL, so they obviously know about it. They even have the proper page indexed. But they never got around to dropping the old one, even after more than four years. Nicely done, Microsquish (IMG:style_emoticons/default/thumbup1.gif)

[Jill]

Heh yep. They've got my old hra page still too:
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=&d=76...502d34,7b001d98

It's been a couple of years since that's been moved.

[OldWelshGuy]

Little wonder that they struggle to compete with Google. How on earth arethey going to compete if/when live search ever comes around?

[Randy]

Sadly, MSN/Bing has pretty much always done that. Yahoo does to a large degree too. Google eventually drops them from their index, but even that takes months in many cases.

Which points out that Permanent Redirects aren't really considered to be permanent for the search engines.

FWIW, I don't look for this behavior to change. Mostly because once they know about a page they know about it and because permanent redirects are only permanent while they're in place.

Also just to mention it I've been doing some testing on different sites to see how quickly I can get new pages picked up... I'm seeing amazingly quick indexing on sites that have an RSS feed that gets submitted to just a few places. Literally, same day indexing on Google of brand new pages when an RSS is in the mix. I don't actually search for the pages, but have Google Alerts set up that get emailed to me each day. So if I make a post to my personal blog in the morning I literally get a Google Alert on it the same day. I find that amazing and intriguing since my blog isn't anything close to what would be considered a news source.

[qwerty]

Yahoo has picked up all of my redirects (although I don't know how long it took them), but they do still have three or four pages listed that have been gone for years and resolve to a 404 -- mostly examples I posted for clients that were only up for a few weeks.

[bwelford]

This is not just a Bing problem. I moved two websites to new domains two months ago. Google will still show web pages at the old location using the site: search. I'm checking in from time to time to see when they are dropped but I'm not expecting that it will be any time soon.

Re fast indexing, I find Google exceptional for blogs with RSS. Within an hour a new post will typically be in the index. Just one more argument for the effectiveness of blogs in SEO. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Alan Perkins]

This is hilarious ... over 3 milliion results:

http://www.bing.com/search?q="Moved+P...oved+here"

I can see why MS may want to index those URLs and their content, as if they generated a 200 rather than a 301 ... but there's no way those URLs and/or that content should feature in search results, surely.

[Deverill]

I'll bet it's for bragging rights. "We have over 3 gazillion pages in our index - Google only has 2 gazillion (quality, more or less) pages."

[Jlee350]

I had a site that had 1,400+ pages indexed, one day (not too long before Bing launched) it dropped to 240 which is roughly the actual number of pages on the site, and then a month later, 1,400+ pages again.

[Jill]

Guess they're still working out the bugs.