Is your website indexed in Bing?
Unlike Google, Bing isn’t an indexing engine. So you can’t expect it to index every page in your site. You need to tell it which pages to index via Bing Webmaster Tools.
I’m not alone in sensing that Bing’s about to make serious inroads into Google’s market share. I’ve just set up a Bing account, filled in the Webmaster form, uploaded my sitemap and added the authorisation code to my site. Because I only validated my site five minutes ago, there’s no analytics data. But under ‘configure my site’ I can manually submit pages for indexing one at a time. Which begs the question which pages do I submit to be indexed in Bing? All of them? If not, which? I’ll have to give that one some serious thought.
In the meantime, because Bing had already indexed my home page and a few apparently random others, I can make the indexed pages the best they can be before submitting more. You just plug in a page url and Bing’s special tool comes back with optimisation suggestions.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Bing’s SEO requirements conflict with what we know about Google’s preferences. If they do I’ll have to make sensible decisions about how far to go, since the big G still holds the lion’s share of the British search market.
Once my ‘Bingified’ pages have been re-crawled, I’ll check my search positions and use them as a benchmark. Then I’ll Bingify the rest of the pages I want indexed and note their SERPs positions, and I’ll finally be ready to tinker and – hopefully – win better positions.
