Google & Bing Are Handling My New Website Soooo Differently
Some of you may know that I recently launched a new hobby blog/website. It’s called Glass Almanac, and it’s all about Google Glass.
The site launched back on July 6th, but in stealth mode. Then I did a public launch on August 8th. “Stealth mode” doesn’t mean I kept the site out of search engines, just that I didn’t say anything about it publicly.
It’s been fascinating to see how differently Google and Bing have handled this new site.
Indexing a New Website
I’ve already posted close to 80 articles on Glass Almanac. There are 14 categories in use now, along with 64 tags — and I’m letting search engines crawl and index both of those types of archives. There are three static pages, too, for a total of about 160 distinct URLs.
If I do a site:glassalmanac.com search on Google, it displays 134 indexed pages.
That’s just a display number, but even clicking through to the end doesn’t change things much. I can see 117 results before Google shows the “several results have been omitted” message. If I click to see those omitted results, I end up with 123 URLs in Google’s index.
That’s pretty good for a new site with very little link equity.
Bing
It’s an entirely different story on Bing, where the same site:glassalmanac.com search leads to this:
Only 10 URLs indexed by Bing, and that’s after almost six weeks. Those 10 URLs include six blog posts, three pages and the RSS feed.
Sad, isn’t it? But not surprising. Bing has admitted that its crawler is slow, but that link points back to a 2010 article. You’d think/hope that things might’ve improved since then, but apparently not.
Traffic Impact
Here’s a look at organic search traffic to Glass Almanac so far:
Yep, almost six weeks after launch, Bing has yet to send me a single visitor. Crazy, isn’t it?
Glass Almanac gets more referral traffic than anything (especially from Google+, believe it or not) at the moment, and that’s something I may write about in the future here on SBSM. In fact, this blog/site launch has been interesting in a number of ways and may inspire some more posts in the near future.
Meanwhile … I can’t help but think that Bing really needs to upgrade its crawler and act like a serious search engine if it wants to compete long-term with Google. If it’s not crawling pages, it won’t be able to send traffic to site owners. And without traffic, many site owners won’t give Bing any consideration as a way to get online visibility.
Just out of curiosity have you seen anything come through from Yandex or Baidu?
No, that analytics graph is ALL of the organic search traffic so far. π
Plus, Glass is US only and only has about 10k people wearng it, so I can’t see much reason why searchers in China or Russia would be looking for info about it.
Saw the same behavior on a site I launched in the same manner in July. The Bing crawler results had gaps of DAYS, meanwhile I accidentally published a post and then unpublished it a few hours later and it was already in the Google index.
“And without traffic, many site owners wonβt give Bing any consideration as a way to get online visibility.”
Wait people are paying attention to Bing currently outside of PPC?
Funny, Dave. π
As I’ve been saying for several years now, you can’t rely on Google for all your traffic: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/you-can-diversify-or-you-can-die/585/
And with Bing allegedly powering about 30% of US searches, it seems unwise to ignore it, don’t you think?
Nice site and concept Matt. Wearables are going to be HUGE.
Google’s index in terms of breadth and depth is what makes the barrier to the search for any players so formidable. No other index, at least English Language, holds a candle to Google’s index. Think of the where else you could rattle off long tail queries all day and get tons of relevant results, sub second.
You are right in that putting all one’s eggs in the Google basket is risky business, especially in the chaos of what was once SEO. For SMBs, local is a great starting point. Good luck with the Glass Almanac.
Indexation is certainly different. Do you mind sharing what log files for actual crawl activity have looked like? My first assumption would be that Bing had less crawl depth, or crawled the whole thing but didn’t index most of it.
You killed it when saying this at the end:
“Glass Almanac gets more referral traffic than anything (especially from Google+, believe it or not)”
Let us analyze this for a bit. Someone shared or linked your site on Google+. Obviously you knew Google indexes Google+ religiously, hence why you see more results.
I am impressed that Bing sees these results. Since the way search engines work is by discovering content. URLs don’t appear in the index out of no where.
So yes, Google indexed your site pretty fast, and adding anything to Google+ shows you how powerful it affects Google Search.
I have noticed this before, and wondered how come Bing is indexing less than a Eighth of what Google is of my site.
That’s probably why I tend to focus on Google, and yahoo is almost a mirror of Bing.
Very interesting Matt, thanks for sharing! I’ve seen similar results with brand new sites but haven’t documented it before. When we launched Kick Point, I think it took almost two months before we got a Bing visitor.
Even I did a similar kind of search for my website and discovered the same facts. My website is 15 months old, Google has crawled 2160 URLs, where as Bing has just 14 pages. It also shows why most of the webmasters pay a lot of emphasis on Google.
I had the opposite result. It is about two months old. I performed the same search on my URL with the following results:
1. Google had 505 results;
2. Bing found 1.020 results!
We have experienced the same thing.
Launched a new site mid April where Bing got stuck at 10 pages even though we registered for Bing Webmaster Tools while Google had 100 pages indexed and steadily increased as we added pages.
Been on holidays so just checked the site operator for both:
Bing 103
Google 116