Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Bing Won't Index Site - Help!
-
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why my client's site is not indexed on bing and yahoo search engines.
My Google analytics is telling me I’m getting traffic (very little traffic) from Bing almost daily but Bing webmaster tools is telling me I’ve received no traffic and no pages have been indexed into Bing since the beginning of December.
At once point I was showing ranking in Bing for only one keyword then all of a sudden none of my pages were being indexed and I now rank for nothing for that website. From Google I’m getting over 1200 visits per month. I have been doing everything I can to possibly find the culprit behind this issue.
I feel like the issue could be a redirect problem. In webmaster tools on Bing I’ve used “Fetch as Bingbot” and every time I use it I get a Status of “Redirection limit reached.”. I also checked the CRAWL Information and it’s saying all the URL’s to the site are under 301 redirect. A month or so ago the site was completely revamped and the canonical URL was changed from non www to www. I have tried manually adding pages to be indexed multiple times and Bing will not index any of the sites pages. I have submitted the sitemap to Bing and I am now at a loss. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get the site listed on Bing.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Stephen -
You have been extremely helpful. Thank you for all your help. I will get right on this to get resolved.
-
Okay, so the crawler is seeing it for the www. version but not for the non www version.
If we look in a browser at:
http://dunninggolf.com it redireects to www.dunninggolf.com
If I look in webbug at the headers it does not redirect and returns a 200 Okay status code for the non www version of the URL.
I think this could be the issue here and that for some reason, when bing visits the site is giving out some strange 301 response which then sends out a loop of 302 redirects.
Okay, there is a tool here that lets you visit the site as if you were bing bot and get the HTTP headers:
http://view-http-headers.gishan.net/fetch-as-bing-bot-tool.jsp
You have to select bingbot rather than IE6 from list of user agents.
If you visit the www.dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 200 OK
If you visit the http://dunninggolf.com version then it returns a 301 redirect (which in turn seemingly issues the loop of 302 temp redirects that never go anywhere).
Okay, there is your issue. The site has some issue with bingbot (and possibly others) when visited via the http://dunninggolf.com URL. This issue is not visible in webbug or a browser. That said, we do seem to get some redirection from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com.
So, taking a stab in the dark, I would say there is some kind of meta refresh or something going on after the page has been returned as a HTTP 200 result. I am not on my windows PC so can't examine the headers more closely but this is certainly your issue here.
You need to find out the following.
1. How are they doing the redirect?
2. why are they redirecting this way?
3. why are they serving up these 301 / 302 loops via http://dunninggolf.com
Ultimately, this is an issue for the developers. You should advise them on correct protocol (a 301 via the HTTP headers from http://dunninggolf.com to http://www.dunninggolf.com and not via this whacky redirect they currently have in place).
Wowzers, that was a tricky one!
Hope this helps and sorts out your headache!
Marcus
-
I have used SEO analyzer before and i did it again just now and it gave me some weird error.
This is the result:
<label class="error" for="seoUrl">The URL has too many redirects</label>
| ! Redirects detected for the current URL |
I also have submitted the URL in the "submit URL toolbox page" a couple times.
I will get working on the robots.txt and make sure it's put in place.
I don't do any of the development work on the site i just perform the SEO duties. Seeing those redirect errors is part of what im talking about with it saying there are to many redirects. Any idea what that's all about if its showing everything should be working properly?
I just scanned it again and based on the URL i enter i get different results.
those redirect errors come when i analyze dunninggolf.com. But when i analyzed www.dunninggolf.com I only 2 errors on homepage for missing alt tags on images and no H1 tag. -
Hmm, five months is a bit long.
Lets look at what we do know.
1. Bing is telling you that the page it is trying to fetch is redirecting and the bingbot does not follow redirects (1).
2. If I fetch your page in a browser or a even just the headers in webbug I get a HTTP 200 OK status code and no 301 redirect.
So, the site itself seems fine. The pages are serving up fine and they are returning the correct HTTP status codes.
So.. have you tried analysing the page in the SEO Analyser? http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/seo-analyzer-97615e21
If so, what does that tell you? It should detail the HTTP response codes that bing is seeing.
One possiblity is that there is something whacky going on for the bing user agent but fetching the page as bingbot also returns a 200 status code.
There is no robots.txt so I would put that straight first up as suggested and at the very least go with:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /Without access tp webmaster tools and digging further it is hard to see what is going on but 5 months seems too long. That said, there are no issues preventing crawling or indexation in so far as a 15 minute look can identify.
Daft question but have you submitted the URL via:
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url
I have just submitted it just in case you have only done via webmaster submit.
Anyhow, it's not secret that bing can be horribly slow and it seems that it still believes you have 301 in place for some reason and I could not find one.
Maybe one for Bing Webmaster Support as it seems there is no good reason why they would not index this site and the tools at your disposal are not working as they should: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-support-24ab5ebf
References
1. http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/fetch-as-bingbot-fe18fa0d
-
I have been working on getting some new links and have gotten a couple but nothing substantial as of yet.
This client is new for me and i am only aware of this site being around since June or July of last year.
I've been waiting for bing to show search results for the site for almost 5 months now and nothing has changed. I am getting to the point where i feel the culprit lies somewhere else besides saying bing indexing slowly as being an excuse.
-
It looks like the site was down for a long period of time and was redirecting to another site: http://web.archive.org/web/20090615041707/http://dunninggolf.com/
It also then looks like there was a holding page up for a while.
I can't see the complete history on archive.org and nothing since Feb 2011 but it looks like these historical redirects are your problem.
Few questions
How long has the new site been up?
Have you won any new links?
It seems that Bing still believes this site is redirecting somewhere else so you may just have to wait a while till they update their index. You could ask them to remove all of the links that they do currently hold.
If Bing webmaster tools is anyting like Google Webmaster tools the information there is horribly out of date so it may just be a matter of waiting this out till they recrawl the site and refresh everything.
A good use of your time may be just getting your on page ducks in a row and making sure everything else is okay.
- The canonical looks fine.
- There are no 301's on the pages I visited
- You have no robots.txt file
- Google is indexing it okay
Ultimately, I think this is a case of waiting it out. If you want to speed things up, try to get some fresh links to the site from well ranking sites to help drive the crawlers your way.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Yeah, the URL is http://www.dunninggolf.com/
-
I did check a small handful of pages and i did see rel="canonical" in the page source code. I only saw it on product pages and category pages etc. blog and other pages not advertising product i didn't see it.
But like i said i only checked about 8 pages and 6 out of the 8 had that tag on it.
-
Hey Stephen
Can you post a URL so we can take a look? Anything else would be a complete shot in the dark.
Marcus
-
Double check that the recent rel=can update for the main URL / homepage (your non-www to www) has not been accidentally applied to ALL the pages. That single mistake can hoark a site's indexing 100%.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Kickboard2 -
How to Diagnose "Crawled - Currently Not Indexed" in Google Search Console
The new Google Search Console gives a ton of information about which pages were excluded and why, but one that I'm struggling with is "crawled - currently not indexed". I have some clients that have fallen into this pit and I've identified one reason why it's occurring on some of them - they have multiple websites covering the same information (local businesses) - but others I'm completely flummoxed. Does anyone have any experience figuring this one out?
Reporting & Analytics | | brettmandoes2 -
Losing referrer data on http link that redirects to an https site when on an https site. Is this typical or is something else going on here?
I am trying to resolve a referral data issue. Our client noticed that their referrals from one of their sites to another had dropped to almost nothing from being their top referrer. The referring site SiteA which is an HTTPs site, held a link to SiteB, which is also an HTTPs site, so there should be no loss, however the link to SiteB on SiteA had the HTTP protocol. When we changed the link to the HTTPs protocol, the referrals started flowing in. Is this typical? If the 301 redirect is properly in place for SiteB, why would we lose the referral data?
Reporting & Analytics | | Velir0 -
What does 'Safari (in-app)' mean in Google Analytics browser traffic?
Hi, can anyone explain what 'Safari (in-app)' refers to in my browser sources? Also, it has a very high bounce rate - any ideas why?
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab1 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Why google stubbornly keeps indexing my http urls instead of the https ones?
I moved everything to https in November, but there are plenty of pages which are still indexed by google as http instead of https, and I am wondering why. Example: http://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum correctly redirect permanently to https://www.gomme-auto.it/pneumatici/barum Nevertheless if you search for pneumatici barum: https://www.google.it/search?q=pneumatici+barum&oq=pneumatici+barum The third organic result listed is still http. Since we moved to https google crawler visited that page tens of time, last one two days ago. But doesn't seems to care to update the protocol in google index. Anyone knows why? My concern is when I use API like semrush and ahrefs I have to do it twice to try both http and https, for a total of around 65k urls I waste a lot of my quota.
Reporting & Analytics | | max.favilli0 -
Big variation in the number of search results. (person's name)
Hi, I have been noticing a really dramatic variation in the number of results Google is returning for the name "Carolyn Hadlock." Most of the time it seems to be around 2000. But then it will jump up to over 10,000. Does anyone know why there would be such a big jump? And then why it would go back? If tested both logged into Google and then not - as well as having others log is as themselves. That does not seem to be it. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Why did my site go from 1,000 Impressions to 0 impressions over the past couple days
so we have been doing a lot of reconstruction our website the past couple days with our navigation and moving stuff around. Now bare with me because i am a noob to SEO and i am still learning. But we went from a steady 800-1000 impressions everyday to a 0 since the first. you can check out our site here: www.hidguy.net Not sure if its because we are moving stuff around or what. But we can notice that our conversion rate has dropped and we have had traffic but no conversions and no orders. Is what we are doing bad or is this normal?
Reporting & Analytics | | Dante130