Stop Ignoring Bing Webmaster Tools

At the beginning of every new engagement we ask clients for access to their Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Adwords data, Bing Webmaster Tools and any other analytics they have. 95% of the time, the client does not have Bing Webmaster Tools set up and 50% of the time they don’t want to go through the (very minor) hassle of setting it up. Most clients are pretty focused on Google of course, but in some cases Bing can still drive significant traffic. And ignoring Bing because it’s not Google can be a big mistake. Case in point:

On January 15th of this year a large news site client’s Bing referrals dropped by about 150,000 – 200,000 sessions/day. So they were losing about 6 million visits per month. That’s not chump change. We did all of the standard technical SEO diagnoses and the site was clean. Google traffic looked fine. So we were pretty sure the problem was not on our end. The only thing I could do was email Bing’s webmaster support which I fully expected to be a black hole. I got a canned “thanks for the submission” response and pretty much forgot about it. But you’ll be amazed at what happened next!:

I ran into Duane Forrester, Bing’s Webmaster relations guy, at SMX West this week and asked him what the standard procedure was for sites that get whacked by Bing. He claimed that the Bing Webmaster Tools team takes these support inquiries seriously and the key is to be credible and patient. He stressed that you should not have multiple people submitting support tickets for the same site and described this partly as a resource issue – as in they can only spend so much time on any one site/ticket – and partly as a credibility issue – you should be confident that you have ruled out issues on your side and having ten people pile on complaints to Bing support isn’t going to make them move any faster. Of course the flip side is that asking site owners to be patient while Bing keeps you in the dark and figures out if they screwed something up is a pretty big ask. But there aren’t many other options.

The good news for this particular client is that it appears that the issue was on Bing’s side and they responded to our request. So set up your Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll never know when you’ll need it.