Bing Does Spring Cleaning of Its Search Results - Be Sure Your Sites Aren't Hit

Bing has been hard at work getting rid of Junk links with the goal to provide users with better looking and more relevant search results. They've focused on the following issues.

• Dead Links
• Soft 404's
• Missing Meta Data
• Parked Domains

In a March 19th Blog Post Bing announced the moves they've made to clean out those unwanted trash results. They didn't really go into detail on these changes, but we did our best to research the topic and shed some light on what's going on for you.

How Bing Gets Rid of Dead Links

When BingBot gets a 400 level or 500 level error when they request a URL, they don't immediately remove the URL from search results. Bing realizes that sometimes these are temporary errors. With that in mind they will wait until they get numerous 404, or other 400 level errors returned, before they prompt the crawler to return to verify the link is actually dead.

What Bing didn't tell us is how many revisits they attempt before dropping a link. Historically, search engines in general don't handle the removal broken links such as code 404 missing page errors in a timely manner. We've seen it take as long as 6 months to get old dead links out of both Bing and Google's results. Unfortunately, Bing really didn't tell us anything other than eventually they will remove them.

This is one of the reasons we advise the use of a 301 redirect if you have to remove a URL from your site as the dead link will get removed quickly and any Page Rank that URL had will get transferred to the new location. This is a win-win for search engines and webmasters as it provides a much better solution than a visitor hitting a 404 error page.

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