jatiN mahindrA doT coM

One thing I always see in the search optimization forums are complaints about how Microsoft Bing handles 301 redirects. I actually stopped covering the complaints because I saw them all too often. Today, I have some possible good news.

Steve, a senior member at WebmasterWorld posted a thread at WebmasterWorld that he believes Bing has finally figured out how to handle 301 redirects. He said:

MSN/Bing appears to have finally figured out how to follow 301 redirects, discarding the old URL and indexing/not-penalizing the destination URLs.
This has lead to a lot more URLs from older authority domains coming into the index, and a pretty huge improvement in Bing’s results, including ranking the best pages for a domain for a query instead of second and third choices.

If this continues I see it as a fix of one of the two main weaknesses of Bing compared to google (with the other being a smaller index of obscure stuff).

Finally, some very significant positive news from Bing… unless it all reverts again one of these days and all these 301 destination pages disappear again.

I have not seen any other reports of positive signs of Bing’s 301 handling, but this is a good early sign.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Related posts:

1. Bing Indexing New Content & Sites Faster?
2. Bing Requires 3 MSNBot Crawls To Register 301 Redirects
3. News Corp May De-List Themselves From Google & Partner With Microsoft Bing
4. More Reports of Bing Correctly Handling 301 Redirects
5. Microsoft Bing November 2009 Search Update?
6. 3 Days Later, Bing Finally Fixes Webmaster Tools Bug
7. Did Microsoft Finally Fix The Fake Referrer Spam Issue?
8. Microsoft Bing Still Spamming Fake Referrers In Webmaster Log Files
9. Cuil Reviews Bing: SEOs Take Notice
10. Is Bing Ignoring The NoArchive Tag?
11. Microsoft Page Hunt, Game To Make Bing Better
12. URL Rewrites and 301 Redirects – How Does It All Work?