For most people (and webmasters), Google is the only search engine, or
at least the only worthy search engine. Granted that it controls
two-thirds of the market. But with Bing and Yahoo!
partnering up, they control a quarter of the market share as well. So
it's time we paid more attention to Bing, because unlike Google Search,
things don't just magically happen with Bing. For example, Bing doesn't
easily index sitemaps for Blogger and WordPress blogs.
Apparently, Bing's indexing system is quite different from that of
Google. In Google, you simply have to submit your sitemap to Webmaster
Tools, and it will automatically index your blog after a few days. But
with Bing, there's no knowing when your blog will be indexed. Often
times, it simply doesn't index your sitemap. Bing's community forums are
filled with complaints just like this.
There's a reason why Google owns the market space. It has a mature and
sophisticated search engine, whereas Bing still needs to learn a lot.
Perhaps we're too used to Google by now to enjoy the features offered by Bing.
But be that as it may, Bing is still in its infancy, and have yet to
develop the rich indexing capabilities offered by Google. Here are some
of the ways the Bing search engine works differently from Google.
Page size - Back in the days of old, Google used to limit page sizes to
100K, at which point its crawler would truncate, and stop further
crawling of a page. Now, that limit is gone. Bing, however, still
retains such a limit (of approximately 100K). This results in an
incomplete crawling in case where a page size is large, or contains rich
media.
Redirections - Bing, unlike Google, doesn't support 302
redirects. Google works with both 301 or 302, but if a website returns a
302 to Bing, it refuses to follow and index that page, and sometimes
refuses to index the website altogether!
Canonical pages - Bing doesn't support canonical tags either. It
relies on the web-developer to handle canonicalization from a
programmatic standpoint. Bing initially accesses a domain without the
"www" part. If a 200 (OK) is returned, it keeps that version. If it
finds a 301, only then will it go to the www version. 302 errors are
discarded as discussed.
Backlinks - Google clearly has the largest index. In years past,
Google made a big deal about how many web pages were in their index.
These days, they don’t really brag too much about their index size as
they have won that battle. Bing doesn’t even play. Instead of seeking
to index each and every piece of content available on a domain, Bing
actively removes web pages from their index if those pages are not found
to have enough link authority or value to rank in their SERPs.
As you can see, Bing lags miles behind Google. If you want your blog to
be indexed at all, you should build authoritative and relative
backlinks, and submit each URL of your website individually to their URL
submission tool. Make a habit of regularly submitting new URLs in order
to get your blog indexed. There's no easier way :(
Bing will certainly evolve as their search engine matures. Stay tuned
for our future posts that will discuss ranking factors for Bing as well
as updates to their indexing capabilities Stay frosty :)