I was all excited, I saw widespread reports of a Bing Search algorithm update at WebmasterWorld and then I dug deeper and it seems it was more related to how Google Analytics reports organic traffic from Bing.
Something changed because of several really large sites I track, I saw as much as a 25% decrease in organic traffic this past week to the week before. But at the same, I saw a 200%+ increase in referral traffic from Bing.
Here are some of the larger sites, but I checked way more than just four site profiles:
- Organic Bing Traffic Down 20% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 350%
- Organic Bing Traffic Down 5% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 145%
- Organic Bing Traffic Down 10% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 265%
- Organic Bing Traffic Down 22% But Bing Referral Traffic Up 230%
Shepard from WebmasterWorld first spotted this and said:
Update: seems that our hit in Bing traffic may be an analytics issue. For some reason our Bing traffic is being reported/segmented into “Bing / referral” and “Bing / organic”.
Interesting, maybe Bing changed their URL structure or maybe this has to do with the Bing HTTPS change.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
