Bing & Yahoo are often forgotten when it comes to search engines. That still doesn’t mean you should be forgetting about them when it comes to increasing your website traffic.
You already know that though and that’s why you’ve searched “Bing or Yahoo not indexing my website”.
A couple of our clients know that as well. But for some reason, their websites were not getting indexed by Bing and Yahoo. This was very frustrating for us and them because their site was ranking very welll in Google. If a site ranks well in Google but isn’t anywhere to be found in Bing or Yahoo, chances are good your site isn’t suffering from a penalty. Google seems to have strict penalties and lots of algorithm changes but not Bing and Yahoo.
If this is the case for your website, read on and i’ll explain what you can do to get your website indexed.
Together As One
Bing and Yahoo joined forces when it comes to search and PPC advertising a couple of years ago. This means that you only have to go to Bing Webmaster tools, create an account, confirm you own your website and sumbit your websites sitemap to get indexed and ranking in both search engines.
Depiste this, both search engines still have their different criteria for websites and rankings so you won’t experience similar search results in both engines. However, it’s still nice to only require access to one webmaster tools account.
So now that your website is confirmed with Bing webmaster tools, you can start to check and see why your website is not getting indexed.
Bing & Yahoo Not Indexing My Website
It might take a few days or a week for Bing to gather data once your website once you have signed up and submittted your sitemap. When you do, you can go to your dashboard and you’ll see this:
If you look at the pages crawled and see your site is getting crawled but see that zero pages are getting indexed, then you have an issue.
You can take a look at Bing’s support article on what to do if you’re not in the index. Go through and check to make sure everything is fine with your website. Now the chances are good that if Google is indexing your site, you won’t have a problem with Bing.
I wrapped my brain around the issue of their site not getting indexed for months. We had one possible cause for the issue and that was we had an old domain being 301 redirected to the new domain and thought that Bing was penalizing them for it.
But we didn’t know for sure so I sent them a request to figure what was wrong through their support form.
Within two days I got this response:
“Hi Jordan,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I have reviewed your issue and found the site is currently being blocked. I have escalated your site to our Product Group for site review. I will update you when I receive a response from
the team
Sincerely,
Robert | TECHNICAL SUPPORT ENGINEER
Bing Support | Supporting your needs 24 x 7.”
Wonderful I thought! How easy was that? But I wanted to get some more information from Robert and find out why the site was blocked in the first place. So I sent him a follow up email.
Here’s Robert’s response to my follow up:
“Hi Jordan,
We use internal tools to figure if a site is being blocked. Although, I can see some codes, but the Product Group does that actual investigation why the blocked was triggered, and in most cases they will not share the details of the blocks. Rather than giving out the specifics, the Product Team wants all SEO guidelines to be followed instead of pointing out the error where webmaster’s will just find a work around to avoid the underlining issue and not fix the actual problem.
In other cases similar to yours, a block may have been triggered, but the review team finds it is a false positive and then removes the block.
Hope the helps!
Thank you,
Robert | TECHNICAL SUPPORT ENGINEER
Bing Support | Supporting your needs 24 x 7.”
This wasn’t good enough for me. Deep down I was annoyed to hear the site was blocked but not penalized and that the block was going to be removed despite us doing nothing to site at all. I get they want to make sure all websites are following their SEO guidelines. To me, there wasn’t an error with the site because we did nothing to the site.
Anyways, more back and forth with Robert proved to get me nowhere. All I cared was my clients site was ranking again in Bing & Yahoo. And quite well now I might ad. You can see on November 10th they were not ranking in Bing and Yahoo but as of December 1st, they’re on the first page for almost all search terms.
A few days ago I ran into this exact same issue with another client. I simply sent an email through their support form explaining the site was not getting indexed. This morning I get the exact same email saying they have removed the block and the site will be indexed in 2-3 weeks.
Anyways, Google has a mobile friendly tool which tests your site to see if it was just that. So they tested everyone’s site early in the year and if yours wasn’t mobile friendly, you recieved a warning message like this.
Surely you got that message and that you pay attention to your Webmaster Tools account. Even if you didn’t, you have at some point thought about converting your site to a responsive design/making it mobile friendly. And if you haven’t you need to right away. Not to appease Google and their algorithm, but to give your visitors a better user experience on your site.
Care More About Your Visitors
Considering it’s 2015 and so many people (insert stat here) are using their mobile devices, your site should be mobile friendly. And it should be because you want to give your visitors a great user experience and not because you want better Google search rankings.
Care more about your visitors.
It’s common in SEO for business owners to think more about optimizing their sites for Google rather than the searcher. They look too deep into keyword density and writing content that was created for a search engine crawler and not a human being.
The Google mobilegeddon update brought the same.
Many business owners were focusing more on appeasing Google. It shouldn’t have taken a push and perhaps a threat that your mobile search rankings would plummet if your site wasn’t mobile friendly. All it should have taken was business owners to realize everyone has a mobile phone and everyone is browsing the web on them.
If you don’t a mobile friendly site, people will find a competitors site that is. So the bottom line is out care your competition and provide the best mobile experiece for your visitors.
The Mobilegeddon Update Hasn’t Had An Impact
We didn’t write about the mobilegeddon update because we didn’t think it would have much impact on the mobile search rankings. And as of today, November 19th, they’re still websites that are not mobile friendly ranking higher than mobile friendly ones.
Here are the search results from my mobile device for “care homes Victoria BC”.
There are four search results in the top seven that aren’t mobile friendly. Here are three of those sites.
If you ask me, these sites provide a terrible mobile experience and shouldn’t be ranked where they are. I’m still in my 30’s and am having a hard time reading those sites! Nevermind their market which is mostly children with parents who are 70+ and needing a care home.
So we’ve yet to see the impact and big changes to the mobile search rankings. But that shouldn’t stop you from having a mobile friendly site.
Care more for your visitors and provide them with a great mobile experience on your site.
Backlinks. You cannot talk about SEO and not talk about backlinks.
Are they important? Yes. But not as much as they use to be.
Over the last year we’ve found that content marketing is more important when it comes to local SEO. You still need backlinks though. And this blog post will show you an easy way to generate backlinks from a local source.
The most effective backlinks will come from local sources like local business directories or from other local businesses websites. Another source is Meetup.com. Just how can you get backlinks from Meetup.com?
Read on and I’ll explain.
How to use Meetup for backlinks
Individual meetup groups are used for recreation, networking, learning new skills and more. You’re bound to find a group in your area that is somehow related to your business and that you can help out. You helping them could entail hosting an event, like an educational workshop, or sponsoring the group for a cost. Whatever you do for them, part of the agreement will likely include the group putting a link to your businesses’ site on the main page of their group.
So how do you approach a Meetup group?
First off, I recommend searching for groups in your local area only, unless you’re looking to grow your business elsewhere. Once you’ve found some groups that could work for you, get someone on your staff to join the group as a participant to see whether a partnership could work.
This will allow you to find out whether they’re in need of financial sponsorship, how often they meet, how many people attend and any other information that might help you determine the fit. You can also speak with the organizer of the group casually, too.
Once you’ve decided whether you’ve got a potential good fit, contact the organizer by email and offer your proposal. Keep in mind the whole time that this partnership should benefit both sides–if they’re not cooperative or as interested as you’d like, move on and pursue other opportunities.
Why should you use Meetup?
They’re many ways to get backlinks on the web, some of which are free, others which involve a link exchange and still others that you’ll pay for. No matter how you’re willing to get the links, you should always aim to get backlinks on sites that have significant strength on search engines and on the web in general.
Meetup.com is great because it has great web strength and it’s local, too. Sponsorship links on Meetup pages are often on the main page of group, so its visibility to site users can definitely help you. This is an invaluable way to increase your local and online presence.
It’s a common misconception that the local search results don’t change much. This can be true for the top three results. In most cases, if you’re in the top three results, you won’t get bumped unless some shady SEO work has been done to your site.
But outside of the top three, the results are changing daily. How do I know?
Beacause I’m constantly analyzing our clients search results. In fact, I obsess over them. Being in a results based business will do that to you.
I’m also obsessing because I want to see what on-site or off-site SEO work we’ve done has improved the rankings. Whether it’s adding content, a few backlinks or business listings, I’m trying to see when a increase in rankings occurs.
As an example, business citations are a key local ranking factor. We might add 15 business listings for a client but Google’s crawlers won’t pick up on those citations and improve the sites rankings for a month or two.
Not to get sidetracked but the moral of this story is the local search results are shifting like the tectonic plates underneath us.
Local Search Results Update
But just how much are they changing on a daily or weekly basis?
I was checking this client because I felt that we had overused a keyword on their home page. Avoiding keyword stuffing is something we pay close attention to. For years it was thought that if you mentioned your keywords on a page a lot, Google liked that. But this is known as keyword stuffing and Google doesn’t like this.
Just recently we had a client who was very cautious of changing their home page content around for SEO value. We had recommended a few changes which they didn’t like. So we didn’t change the content and simply added their targeted keyword to their home page title.
I thought to myself maybe we’ve been going about optimizing home pages all wrong.
Back to the orginal client I was talking about. We removed a few instances of the keyword we are targeting thinking that it was overused and the reason why the rankings weren’t improving as fast. We did this two days ago and I wanted to see if Google had crawled the home page and made any adjustments. So I updated the rankings yesterday and just now.
I was shocked to see how much the results had changed in just a day. I knew they were shifting. Just not this much.
If you’re thinking the results aren’t changing, this should prove to you their not. Google is constantly updating the results based on all the local search ranking factors for 2015.
Google has been known to change the appearance of their search results for some time now. I’m not just talking algorithms but the visual appearance.
It looks like in the last couple of days they have changed their Google My Business listings within the search results.
This is what it looked like before:
This is what the sam search result looks like as of today:
Gone is the A – G or A – C mapped icons. The map has moved from the right of the screen to the top.
Before when you wanted to learn more about a business, you could just scroll of their listing in A – G or A – C listings to see the snippet of their business, reviews, contact info and hours of operation. Now you have to click on a business to see that info. When you do so you are taking to page which shows all the business info along with listings to other businesses.
What’s the take away?
Before the Google My Business listings would show either 3 or 7 listings. Now they are only extensively showing 3 businesses across all the searches I have done.
Take a look over those and get refreshed. Getting in the top 3 now means the world or else you are relaying on people skipping over the first 3 results and finding yours.
Bing & Yahoo are often forgotten when it comes to search engines. That still doesn’t mean you should be forgetting about them when it comes to increasing your website traffic.
Back in April Google released an update to their search algorithm. Many called it 
Backlinks. You cannot talk about SEO and not talk about backlinks.
