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One thing I always see in the search optimization forums are complaints about how Microsoft Bing handles 301 redirects. I actually stopped covering the complaints because I saw them all too often. Today, I have some possible good news.
Steve, a senior member at WebmasterWorld posted a thread at WebmasterWorld that he believes Bing has finally figured out how to handle 301 redirects. He said:
MSN/Bing appears to have finally figured out how to follow 301 redirects, discarding the old URL and indexing/not-penalizing the destination URLs. This has lead to a lot more URLs from older authority domains coming into the index, and a pretty huge improvement in Bing's results, including ranking the best pages for a domain for a query instead of second and third choices.If this continues I see it as a fix of one of the two main weaknesses of Bing compared to google (with the other being a smaller index of obscure stuff).
Finally, some very significant positive news from Bing... unless it all reverts again one of these days and all these 301 destination pages disappear again.
I have not seen any other reports of positive signs of Bing's 301 handling, but this is a good early sign.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Sebastian
10/30/2009 01:54 pm
I still see a gazillion of <a href="http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/put-an-end-to-uri-shortening/#se-howto-suri" rel="nofollow">only URI listings from URI shorteners</a> alone at <a href="http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/put-an-end-to-uri-shortening/#bing-surl-fail" rel="nofollow">Bing</a>. Good news is that a week ago it was 4 times this amount of crappy 301 listings.
Mike
10/31/2009 06:10 pm
The way Bing handles the 301's currently it does index the top level, ridiculous!