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Adding your site to Bing Webmaster may be simple, but getting it to work is very troubling
In my previous post, I talked about setting up a web site and the effort necessary to train Google how to crawl your site so that it would do it within 30 minutes. That exercise turned out to be far better than expected as the goal was to get posted articles to show up within 30 minutes. I posted that almost a month ago and now at 75 days and counting, articles are still showing up in Google search on average in about 10 minutes. This was really better than expected for a new site. I have since turned my attention to Yahoo and Bing as the next large search engines. Since Yahoo is using Bing search as a commodity, I will be focusing on Bing since it represents both.
Unfortunately, the results for Bing search and Bing Webmaster Tools are not as good as expected. In fact, I am very disappointed in the results. Setting things up was very straight forward in the process and I will be reporting more in the future when I get more substantial results from the unscientific testing that I am doing. At the moment, things are not doing well for my efforts. I set up Bing Webmaster at day 41 of my Google testing and I am now at day 37 of the Bing testing with some strange activities in the process.
One specific item is that the site map that I added to Bing Webmaster is still showing as being in a state of Pending, which does not make any sense. For Google, I knew within hours whether there was a problem with the sitemap. Not the case with Bing. If you do a Google search on "bing sitemap pending", you will get a large number of results coming back. I filtered that on the last month and still have a large result set. It seems that there are problems with the "Pending" indicator which I started tracing back to November last year and then stopped. The most recent comments from Bing forums show that the support group is aware of them and a fix is coming at the end of March. Looks like there is no big rush in fixing this problem. Google would have had this corrected a long time ago.
In looking at the Bing Webmaster Tools, my site is being crawled everyday and being indexed. The problem that I am having at the moment is that the vast majority of pages are not showing up when I do the Site command on the Bing or Yahoo sites. That is not good when they are crawling the site everyday. Things are being indexed as well, but the results are not showing up. This is far different than what Google Webmaster tools is accomplishing for me. I have read some information where it appears that Bing places a higher emphasis on the longevity of a site and if so, that might explain why after 37 days that 6 out of over 40 articles are showing up. What happened to all the other articles from when I posted the site map?
It seems that Bing is picking things up very sporadically. Here is a quick summary of articles posted
- Posted on Day 1, picked up by Bing 10 days later
- Posted on Day 8, picked up by Bing 19 days later
- Posted on Day 27, picked up by Bing 1 day later
- Posted on Day 31, picked up by Bing same day
- Posted on Day 33, picked up by Bing same day
- Posted on Day 37, picked up by Bing same day
Some of you might be thinking that Bing is working pretty good if it is picking things up the same day. The problem is that an article is being posted each and every day in this test, so there are major gaps in what Bing is searching on and reporting on. In general, Bing has failed in this test to date and if the information that Bing places a higher premium on an older site, then it would make sense. More research into that aspect still needs to be done.
It is too early to report final findings on this, but the preliminary information is not looking very good on this report. As I begin to get more reliable information from Bing and they are picking up all the articles on the site, I will put out a final article on the findings. For now, it is a work in progress and more information needs to be gathered.
Same here, Google webmaster tools works just fast and effeciently but when you take everything to Bing webmaster tools it just doesn't work at all and it's always pending as well. The funny thing is, your urls does get indexed because they do slowly show up on the searches but then it's nowhere near an "okay" stage. It's just full of bugs and flaws..
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