It’s been a little while since we’ve reported on anything involving Bing and how it’s functioning for webmasters and SEO professionals.
While Microsoft’s newest search engine has been gaining market share in online search since its inception, webmasters and SEOs have had to deal with some glitches. Here are two of the latest.
A few days ago, webmasters were reporting in Bing’s forum that the search engine’s webmaster tools utility was not accepting URLs with hyphens in them. This caught my attention since our URL for this blog has a hyphen along with our SEO firm’s homepage (http://www.seo-advantage.com/).
Fortunately for our homepage, if you enter the URL without a hyphen, you end up at the same place.
Technicians at Bing are working on the problem and may have resolved it already.
The other glitch causing headaches for webmasters and SEOs is the crawler for the search engine is crawling a page twice – once for its compressed version and the other time for the uncompressed version.
Comments in the Bing forum complain that this is a waste of bandwidth and defeats the purpose of HTTP compression. An older thread from WebMasterWorld discusses image indexing by search engines and that possibly being a cause of the problem.
While Bing says they are working on the problem, there is no confirmation on when it will be resolved.
Stay tuned for any further updates to these issues or any technical issues with Bing.