This would be amusing enough on its ownIts been days since Bing was last unavailable, and while Im sure Googles automated bots caught the page while it was actually down, its strange that it is taking this long for it to recognize the updated page. Bing may currently see traffic that pales in comparison to Googles, but its no slouch either, and many much smaller sites are indexed by Google on an hourly basis.

But it gets even better: Bings Twitter account just sent a message directed towards Googles, asking if they could take a look at their index and captions.

This might seem like a trivial goof on Googles part, but it could actually have a fairly significant impact. Given how many people rely on using their browsers integrated search box (which is often set to Google) rather than their address bar, I suspect there are quite a few queries for bing on Google every day.

Read more: Bing To Google: Try Updating Your Index Once In A While

Within 4 days the homepage for the domain was showing in Bing and Google as shown below (yahoo just didnt love me enough)Im a big advocate of using sitemaps, and I think this demonstrates their effectiveness. Unless you have a really small site or really good site architecture, chances are some parts of your website arent as exposed, or well linked as others, and this helps you spoon feed the search engines your content insuring better crawling.

Thats not to say you should use sitemaps and not worry about spiders being able to crawl, because internal anchor text can play a huge role in SEO. However use on XML sitemaps as a redundant backup plan to help make sure you fully crawled and indexed.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

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