Hi guys, I thought you'd be interested in a follow up on this.

So I submitted my sitemap to Bing - all good, no issues, Bing successfully retrieved it.

However after submitting it, my site has effectively disappeared from the SERPs! A number of internal pages are being indexed, but the head/brand queries (where I was ranking incorrectly at #1) are now showing nothing.

Very strange. Not sure what else I can do - luckily Bing accounts for a tiny fraction of my traffic!

Cheers

Karl

Hi guys,

Sorry for the late reply and thanks for the help!

It's not super straightforward for me to generate a sitemap as the backend of my site is on a separate domain to the presentation layer / front-end. In saying that, it is possible and it's something I'll be doing soon. Will report back and let you know how things go...

Cheers

Hi guys,

My website exists on a subdomain (i.e. https://website.subdomain.com) and is being indexed correctly on all search engines except Bing and Duck Duck Go, which list 'https://www.website.subdomain.com'. Unfortunately my subdomain isn't configured for www (the domain is out of my control), so searchers are seeing a server error when clicking on my homepage in the SERPs.

I have verified the site successfully in Bing Webmaster Tools, but it still shows up incorrectly.

Does anyone have any advice on how I could fix this issue?

Thank you!

Cheers mate, much appreciated!

Could you kindly outline why it may be a bit more beneficial from a search perspective to use a directory? Just interested...

Cheers

Hi guys

I look after a festival website whose program changes year in and year out. There are a handful of mainstay events in the festival which remain each year, but there are a bunch of other events which change each year around the mainstay programming.This often results in us redoing the website each year (a frustrating experience indeed!)

We don't archive our past festivals online, but I'd like to start doing so for a number of reasons

1. These past festivals have historical value - they happened, and they contribute to telling the story of the festival over the years. They can also be used as useful windows into the upcoming festival.

2. The old events (while no longer running) often get many social shares, high quality links and in some instances still drive traffic. We try out best to 301 redirect these high value pages to the new festival website, but it's not always possible to find a similar alternative (so these redirects often go to the homepage)

Anyway, I've noticed some festivals archive their content into a subdirectory - i.e. www.event.com/2012

However, I'm thinking it would actually be easier for my team to archive via a subdomain like 2012.event.com - and always use the www.event.com URL for the current year's event. I'm thinking universally redirecting the content would be easier, as would cloning the site / database etc.

My question is - is one approach (i.e. directory vs. subdomain) better than the other? Do I need to be mindful of using a subdomain for archival purposes?

Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks!