I’ve been reviewing the SEO results for my clients and have noticed something odd with Bing.
Looking at the search traffic for Bing it would appear that a number of my clients are getting a lot of search traffic from Bing for single word search terms such as “products”, “travel” or “contact”.
This is something we noticed in MSN some time ago but as Bing was due to be launched we hoped that this issue would be resolved, however since Bing has been live for about a month we are able to see how this engine is sending information to our analytics and Bing is still sending visits for single word search terms through and the issue of single word referrers to a website from MSN seems to have been transferred to Bing.
If you look at the referrers coming through to your website and notice some of these single word terms and then check them in Bing it is unlikely that your website will have rankings in the SERPs for these terms.
Some people might think that this is some kind of search spam from MSN or Bing, but this is not the case as it generally seems to only be sending one word from the search term used. So for example “back packer travel insurance” might come through as “travel” from Bing. However, as we can’t see the real search term, it’s difficult to see if there is a rule for the truncation of these search terms. So, although this is annoying it’s not something that will cause any damage to your site or traffic stats.
There seems to be some evidence that earlier versions of Internet Explorer using Bing could be where these truncated single word search referrers are coming through in website sites. This doesn’t appear to be a problem in newer versions of IE or Firefox.
We wait to see if Bing will address this issue and resolve it so that you can get more useful information from your website stats.
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