Not too impressed with bing

Lets just say that I am not very impressed with "bing". Here are the stats from my bing webmaster tools, and this is to my main forum that has 63,345 post and 796,949 post. I even submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago to my bing account.

Last crawled: 7/19/2009
Indexed pages: 3,010

Out of over 800,000 urls submitted in the site map, bing has only inexed 3,010 urls.

I am NOT impressed, even in the slightest.

 

Last crawled: 20-7-2009 (last crawl on root was 14-7-2009 however)
Indexed pages: 78


Yeah...

 

Only 296 pages indexed on my largest forum. Not impressive at all.

 

Last crawled: 7/15/2009
Indexed pages:2

So I went on the Bing forums and took a look around. Lots of people complaining they have submitted site maps, the site is validated and there are very few results if any.
Brett Yount who has "Program Manager | Bing Webmaster Center" in his sig is broken record. Thread after thread has the following from him.

 

It wont be long and people will be seeing through all the big hype. Its just msn or live with a different name.

 

I was about to sign up with bing - glad I didn't now! Thanks Kev and co for helping me make up my mind!

 

I do think it's worth signing up, even a slight trickle of traffic is a good thing. It just won't be a firehose like Google.

 

Still, some people do STILL use Bing. Even signing up at such useless thing...wouldn't it still widen the opportunity of more people to sign up?

 

I posted a thread about this same thing over at DP. And someone that is "supposed" be from the bing search engine posted a reply. He said that they are working on improving the search engine and indexing more pages.

 

This,

I realize my site is small but I get a good fair amount of traffic from Bing and it hasn't cost me one cent.

 

Maybe they don't want to index everything or visit your site much because there's so much worthless junk out there? I know if I has a search engine, I'd skip over most of the stuff on general chat forums.

 

It really doesn't take all that long to submit your sites, and even if it only brings a little traffic it still has the potential to bring in a little revenue. Over time it will be worth it.

 

Why spend time adding your site when you can just link to it?

 

People say they get more pages indexed when they submit their sitemaps to the search engines. More indexed pages, more chances people will find you.

 

This.

I mean it's more likely they would find you more if you submit your site rather than just linking. =\ It's about the easy access to your site and to prove the users who use different search systems the easy access to actually use their preferred search engine.

 

Regional sites with related services like shopping will fare a lot better in Bing than general purpose sites. When I do a search on Bing it gives me results related to my local area not general purpose or global links. That is the draw of the service. If I search for Chinese Food than I get local restaurants, not a Wikipedia page (which is the first result for every single Google Search I do).

If your site isn't regional or doesn't target the local audience, its results will be less than spectacular. Since that is what people are using the "Decision Engine" for than it makes sense that they would index sites that provide goods and services before other sites. I know it sucks to be on a waiting list but that is just how things work. Of course, they could flood the internet with a trillion bots like Google so there are several hundred on your site at a time eating your bandwidth and inflating your visitor numbers.

 

That's good to know about Bing targeting local sites; I have a few in the pipeline and will make a point of submitting them to Bing.

 

I posted on the Bing forums asking why my site was not getting indexed even when site maps were submitted. It comes down to Bing not handling forums well. They are working on this and hope to have something for November of this year that will address the crawling of forums.

Right now backlinks is very important to Bing. My take is that if one was to try and build a huge amount of backlinks to satisfy Bing you could run afoul of Google and lets face facts. Google is still the defacto search tool so for now I'll keep sending Bing the site maps and live with the status quo while hoping they do a better job on our type of sites.

 

:lol: Then if they are on DP (looking for advice/feedback I'd assume) I don't expect them to stick around long.


But anyway, most of us know its simply a revamped and fancier MSN/Live search in terms of end-user fanciness (and more and more people who don't make their living online are using it), it wasn't ever really marketed to webmasters and we all already knew that MSN/Live and Yahoo keep a tremendously smaller cache/storage of any sites pages compared to Googles.

I'd be happy to have the 3k or however many it was indexed and getting any extra traffic I could from them right now as they continue to expand and work things out.