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%.
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
-
Website excluded from indexing, google-selected canonical: N/A
The google search console revealed to me that none of my pages was indexed, all pages are listed in the 'excluded' section "duplicate, google chose different canonical than user".
Reporting & Analytics | Jun 30, 2020, 7:12 AM | Fibigrus
But in the URL-inspection tab it shows me google-selected canonical: N/A Indexing and crawling is both allowed. Don't know how to get my pages to be indexed correctly. (by the way, they do NOT exist in other languages, so that can't be a reason why google might think they are a duplicate. There's definitively no other version of those pages available)0 -
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 | Apr 23, 2019, 8:19 AM | Kickboard2 -
Redirecting all URLs appended with index.htm or index.html
It has come to my attention with one of my clients (WordPress website) that for some time they have within their Landing Page report (of GA - Google Analytics) URLs that should all be pointing to the one page, example: domain.com/about-us, also has a listing in GA as domain.com/about-us/index.htm Is this some kind of indication of a subdirectory issue? Has anyone had experience with this in such wordpress plugins as Yoast SEO, or other SEO plugin? My thoughts here are to simply redirect any of these non-existent files with a redirect in .htaccess - but what I'm using isn't working. I will insert the redirect here - - and any help would be greatly appreciated. RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?
Reporting & Analytics | Sep 14, 2016, 2:26 PM | cceebar
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ http://www.dupontservicecenter.com/$1 [R=301,L] and this rewrite doesn't work: RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+).htm$ http://dupontservicecenter.com/$1.php [R,NC] _Cindy0 -
Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?
When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic. Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set? Thanks, Jacob
Reporting & Analytics | Jul 15, 2016, 5:21 PM | jacob.young.cricut0 -
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 | Nov 5, 2015, 2:27 PM | 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 -
Migrated website but Google Analytics still displays old URL's and none new?!
I migrated a website from a .aspx to a .php and hence had to 301 all the old urls to the new php ones. It's been months after and I'm not seeing any of the php pages showing results but I'm still getting results from the old .aspx pages. Has any one had any experience with this issue or knows what to do? Many thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | Jun 3, 2015, 10:08 AM | CoGri0 -
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 | Jan 29, 2015, 9:49 PM | max.favilli0 -
Setting Up Google Analytic with Sub Folder Sites
What is the best way of setting up Google Analytic for a website that has many sub folders? The main site is example.com and it has 40 sub folder sites like example.com/uk example.com/France etc etc Would it be advised to track a single domain in Google Analytic then create filters for the sub folder sites. Filters > Include traffic from > Sub directories Also with this method is it possible to view overall incoming website stats for everything? Previous experience would be great with this thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | Apr 2, 2012, 8:43 PM | daracreative0