What To Do If Your Website Is Not Indexed By Bing & Yahoo

BingBing & 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.

local-seo-consultant

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:

Bing-And-Yahoo-Not-Indexing-My-Website

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.

So what to do next?

Send them an email!

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.

So all you have to do is make sure your website is complying with their index guidelines and if so, send them an email explaining you have checked everything and you want to know why your site is being blocked.

It’s that easy!