As Google’s Penguin update is having its fun, Bing has been relatively calm. There has not been a major update in a few months and everything seems perfect. Well, everything used to be perfect.
There’s a member on Webmaster World that noticed Bing was indexing fewer pages on his site. This wasn’t a small change either. Bing used to index 500,000 URLs on the site, but was now only indexing 350,000. That’s a worrying change. The question now is whether or not Bing pushed some kind of update or if its just not indexing like it used to.
Search Engine Roundtable jumped on the case. They began to look at their own indexed pages and found the numbers to be fairly consistent. There we no major drops. OK, so what about impressions and clicks? They found that those numbers had exponentially increased. The crawl rate seemed to be normal as well.
So what’s up with the guy who thinks Bing is not doing its fair share in indexing? We get a better idea by looking at the responses to his original post. Some Webmasters have shared in the original poster’s pain by saying their indexed pages have seen similar drops.
A later post sheds more light on the event though. They say that the people at Bing told them that all of their URLs are being indexed. It’s just a problem with those numbers not showing up in results. Even so, that’s a pretty serious problem if the Bing Webmaster Tools show sites being delisted or URLs no longer being indexed.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Have you seen any changes in the amount of sites being indexed by Bing? I find it highly unlikely that Bing has rolled out an update, but the impending release of the new Bing may be having an effect on indexing for certain sites.