Yahoo and Bing Ranking Hits

[PeaSoupDigital]

Morning,

Has anyone else in the UK seen a massive ranking shift on Bing and Yahoo over the last week? One of our eccommerce client's  main keywords was ranking #3 and #11 on Bing and Yahoo respectively last week, but today they've dropped to #32 and #35.

It seems rather strange as pretty much all of the main keywords have increased on Google. In fact, pretty much all of the Google rankings are the highest they've been since the SEO campaign commenced in October/November!

Cheers,

Lewis

[BradyDCallahan]

I wouldn't say you've overreacted, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on. But just know that those search engines typically perform together, so it's almost like a drop in performance in only one of them.

Check for any weird crawl issues that may have accidentally been set-up in robots.txt or on the page-level (specifically blocking other bots but allowing Google's?) or any glitches that could be making your pages "look" different to Bing/Yahoo.

However, my guess is it's just testing and things will bounce back shortly. Maybe some strong competitors entered the fray? Check Bing/Yahoo SERPs manually for clues... hope it bounces back for you! And kudos on strong Google organic performance.

[PeaSoupDigital]

Hi,

Cheers for your input, Brady. I guess I may have overreacted a tad! It just seemed a bit weird that the Bing and Yahoo rankings have dropped like stones overnight.

[BradyDCallahan]

It's not a surprise that both Bing and Yahoo rankings are dropping together, as performance on these engines seem to be more or less the same in my experiences.

If Google ranking and traffic are up however, you may not have anything to worry about. Instead of just focusing on rank, prioritize by search volume and target keywords for your business. If your priority or "money" keywords are still reaching your website - and you're still getting good traffic quantity via Google search - I'd give Bing/Yahoo time to come around.

They test their organic results too, so maybe it's just a short-term test. Another good bit of advice moving forward: never overreact to a rank report or two. Sometimes it's something you've implemented or your competitor, but sometimes it's just normal SERP flux or random results. These inconsistencies will sort themselves out.

Sorry for not having insight on the specific market, but figured I'd chime in.