Bing Penalty
-
I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing.
Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results.
Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties?
Here is what I have done so far:
-
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request?
-
Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856
-
there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post).
Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.
-
-
I would assume it is manual and begin the process of reconsideration (immediately due to them taking a while - some two to three months). The reason I say that is that there is nothing in Site:url. I cannot think of any other reason that there would be zero indexed pages showing.
Have you looked on Bing for cached pages (out of curiosity more than anything)? -
Thanks for the advice Robert.
Bing WMT Index Summary shows zero pages indexed.
The site has no major issues in terms of malware, hidden content, etc. The site does have issues with duplicate content and thin content. I am working with the site owner to resolve these issues.
Is there any means to determine if the penalty is manual or algorithmic? Since the site's home page has been removed should I assume it is a manual penalty? The articles I referenced above seem to indicate Bing will algorithmically remove a site from it's index if it feels there are content issues.
-
Ryan,
I am assuming you have gone into Bing Webmaster Tools, but in case you have not, here is info re determining if a penalty exists:
Bing says:To determine if a penalty has completely blocked your site from the Bing index, log in to Bing Webmaster Tools, and review the messages to the webmaster on the Home tab. If no messages about penalties are found, select the registered site in question from the SITES list, and then review the Index Summary chart on the Dashboard tab. If the number of pages indexed has dropped down to zero, then your site has a severe index penalty levied against it. Note that Bing Webmaster Tools does not currently display the status of lesser index penalties. (NOTE: Italics above are mine)
On the chance you have been penalized, here is the link to reconsideration; Bing Support Re Reconsideration
I have not suffered a penalty on Bing and called a few friends and none have experience. Sorry I could not be more help.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Bing not indexing website for some weird quality reason
Hi,I have a strange problem. My website www.dealwithautism.com is just 2 months old and have 40+ high quality articles that are already beginning to see some organic traffic from Google without any off page SEO (link building, etc). By quality articles I mean:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DealWithAutism
1. Each article is 1500+ words of unique and highly relevant content with solid on page SEO (images may be reused from Google images). Moz page grader=A for most pages 2. Pretty well structured (with good number of internal links) 3. Entire site (all pages) delivered over https SSL using 301 redirect 4. No malware or spammy backlinks 5. NAP details and social signals available 6. Already ranking top10 in google SERPs for long tail KWs 7. According to Google Webmasters, no crawl errors except for a few (less than 10) 404s 8. Fully responsive - all pages tagged as "Mobile Friendly" by Google However, since day 1, Bing has not indexed a single page on my website (xml sitemap was updated from day 1) even though they are crawling the site. I recently raised an Email ticket and this was their response: "Upon checking, it appears that your site did not meet the standards set by Bing to get indexed the last time it was crawled. However, we will be looking further into this issue along with the Product Group to review the content of your website for re-evaluation. We currently do not have an ETA for the update but please be assured that we will get back to you as soon as they become available." Now based on my previous experience, this could take months. Following are just a few sample pages on the website: https://www.dealwithautism.com/oppositional-defiant-disorder-treatment-and-odd-case-study/ https://www.dealwithautism.com/tourette-syndrome-symptoms-treatment-for-tourettes/ https://www.dealwithautism.com/autism-test-for-toddlers/ I believe the quality of these pages are quite good for a small new website.
Then what does Bing mean by "website not meeting standards"? Am I missing a piece of the puzzle? I would have thought that Google was more quality focused than Bing but my SEO performance in Google is currently exceeding my expectation. Can you experts please help me out here?0 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Google Penguin 2.1 Penalty - Recoverable?
Hello, I have a client that was hit very bad by the Google Penguin 2.1 update. He mentioned he did an intensive link analysis and removed all the bad links; however there were a lot of them (around 6000). His domain has a decent sized domain authority of 30/100. I'm wondering if it's worth it to try and save his domain, or start fresh from a new one. Due to the high number of links I'm not 100% confident that all the bad links were taken care of, and I've heard that even if you remove the links Google won't lift the penalties. What would you do...get a new domain, or risk the next couple months trying to save the existing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven751 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?
Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them. Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain. Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy? Here is the breakdown of sites: Site1: Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products Site2: Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month Site3: Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days. Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching. Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day. Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead. Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category). We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page. FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there. Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related. Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience. Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them. We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now? How to fix it and make the Penguin happy? Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it: 1. Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd. 2. Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links". This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page. 3. On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals. Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall. Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there. Still thinking #2 above could be better? Any other thoughts would be great! Thanks, Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jab10000 -
Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?
Hello, I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it. I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites. I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article. Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612901 -
Penalty for using expired domain?
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using dropped/expired domains with old "clean" backlinks for new sites. Is there be a penalty for doing this (with good intent)? Worth a reconsideration request?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdgySEO0