Bing Search Algorithm Update November 2011

Whenever there is a small change or an algorithmic update in Google search engine, the whole work from home community immediately noticed that and so as the rest of the world. However, whenever Bing makes an algorithmic change (even a big one) it takes some time until people find out about it.

Well, apparently this month Bing had at least one major algorithm change/update to its search engine, which also affects Yahoo as Bing powering it. The problem is that nobody is discussing about it and it barely gets mentioned (which can reflects on its current search engine market share), while the Bing team still haven’t confirmed anything yet.

From what i revealed so far, the update occurred somewhere in the middle of this month (November) and has affected many sites traffic from Bing and Yahoo by 20%-40% which is pretty significant. Personally, i have noticed a meaningful traffic increase from Bing and Yahoo and a huge increase of crawling and indexing my site’s content.

Here is my traffic summary report from Bing Webmaster Tools:

Bing and Yahoo Traffic Stats
Bing and Yahoo Traffic Stats

As you can see i have a more or less 30% traffic increase (it is Bing and Yahoo combined stats). We can also learn that this is a gradual algorithm update which occurs in a few days period of time. But the traffic stats weren’t the biggest change i have discovered… Take a look at my pages index summary stats:

Bing Index Summary Stats
Bing Index Summary Stats

At the beginning of the month, there was an enormous crawling and indexing increase of my site’s pages, about 4-5 times more than it used to be! I can only assume from all these stats changes a few things:

  1. This may be a similar update to Google’s Caffeine, where Bing crawl and index the web faster and at a much larger scale.
  2. The update has implemented in a few steps- Increased crawling/indexing and later on assimilation to the ranking algorithm.
  3. The update may be still ongoing and we will see more changes soon.

I will try to find more information and an official confirmation from the Bing team about this search algorithm update and report back. On the meantime, there is a discussion on the Webmaster World forum about it.