Over the past week, I have been hearing questions and doubts from Webmasters and SEOs on Bing. People have been asking me if Bing has updated their search, ranking and indexing algorithms. I said I have not seen major reports of this and the last update was in mid-November.
Also to think Microsoft would release an update to how Bing ranks results a the weeks preceding the holidays seems a bit illogical. Ever since the big Google Florida update which happened in late November and December, Google and other search engines avoided doing major changes to the search rankings before the holiday season. Why? Well, that is one of the biggest online shopping times and if a search engine moves search results around during this time, it can be devastating to some businesses.
Of course this doesn't mean sites are constantly shuffling around in the search results, it just means there aren't major changes.
So that is why I felt it was unreasonable to think Bing would be updating now.
But I am not so sure. After hearing some webmasters complain about Bing's changes recently and then spotting a thread at WebmasterWorld, I am kind of thinking something might have shifted a bit over at Bing.
One person said:
I've noticed very similar results in the most recent set of weekly rankings I've run - massive drops in lots of keywords, in some cases up to +/-30 places i.e from position 3 to 32!
Have you noticed major changes in how Bing ranks and indexes search results in the past couple weeks?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
