1st January 2023 Something is happening! I have made an update down below!
Let me be absolutely clear, this could be entirely a Bing issue and it could have nothing to do with Ezoic. But I wanted to write to see if anyone else has seen the same issue (please write below if you have!). I have found only one person mentioning Bing traffic drop after joining Ezoic. I should note that since joining Ezoic my Google traffic has only gone up and it more than makes up for the Bing loss.
When looking at my traffic from Bing it has been somewhat steady throughout the year up until September the 13th:
I joined Ezoic on the 9th of August and after the 13th of September the number of Indexed pages on my blog from Bing has slowly dropped day by day:
It peaked at 463 pages and it is now at 182 pages. I am losing between 2 and 5 pages every day. I have contacted Bing support but so far they have not been very helpful. All their replies start with "I have completed my investigation", then what seems to be a canned answer. For example, it will take 3-4 weeks to crawl a newly added site, but my site has been on bing for years and has never had any issues with Bing. I have also been told that there are no technical issues with my site and that the above drop is completely normal and due to "fluctuations"...
When I inspect an excluded page in Bing Webmaster tools I see the error "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation."
I have contacted Ezoic and they will check if there is a pattern.
Drops in search traffic are often hard to track down, I have made no changes to my site other than adding Ezoic and the work that comes with that.
Update 1st January 2023
Happy new year!
Suddenly I am starting to get my pages indexed again, my blog is about halfway there by now:
I am slowly starting to get my pages indexed and getting back some page hits from Bing, after my blog has been almost off the grid for half a year.
So what happened? In the last week three things happened, I am not sure which one made the difference:
- Ezoic reduced the size of the HTML served. The document of my website is now 90-120 KB instead of being 500+ KB. 500 KB is a lot for a HTML document, even though Google easily indexes this I have a suspicion that Bing may have troubles with this. I had previously reached out to Ezoic to reduce the size of the pages that they serve and it seems they have acted on it - Thanks!.
- Removal of AMP. I removed all AMP pages on my blog as I never spent any time on optimising it anyway and I had no clue how my site looked to users hitting AMP pages.
- Contact Bing support. I contacted Bing support yet again. I do not think this was what made the difference as I have received no response. I will update if they get back to me.
I hope the above can help you if you are stuck on this page with a similar problem. If so, please let me know!
That is all
Normally at the end of my posts I write that I hope you found this helpful. Actually I hope you never find this page and that you are without this issue or without a similar one. But if you happen to drop by anyway, please leave a comment down below if you are facing similar issues!