This week Microsoft launched Bing – their latest attempt at search – ahead of schedule. I’ve been playing around with it just a little bit, and have seen some interesting results.
In particular, it seems that the results that Bing is providing are about 4-6 months “behind”. By this I mean, certain links to their results are from older page titles, ones that were changed around 5 months ago.
What does this mean? Well, not a lot if you’ve got a nicely optimized site that has been around for a while. But if you’ve got pages that are newer than say 5 months old, they may not be showing up correctly, or at all.
And if you have a page title or meta description that you’ve changed in the last 5 months, it may be displaying incorrectly. It is in several instances for me, at least.
But don’t worry – I’m sure the BingBot (is that what they’ll call it?) will be around soon enough to re-digest your newer content and changes. In the meantime, you may want to keep an eye on your visit logs to see just when it decides to finally stop by your place.
I also noticed this when giving Bing a test drive. I guess it’s fair to give their “Bingbot” a chance to catch up, but it does seem as though the results were stuck in February!
-Mac