This week while reviewing my GA’s information I noticed that an old site of mine, www.lasvegascrenews.com had suddenly began receiving more traffic of late from Bing, so much so that is surpassed traffic sent to it from Google and is now the number one source of traffic for this site.
The odd thing is this site hasn’t been updated since it finished its purpose in June of 2009. I had originally created the site as a means of conveying to the board of directors and managing partners of Colliers Parrish International that we should look into syndicating their real estate feeds out to local blogs, as well as take a more active role in social media. The site worked well as an example, after its launch in April 2009, with little SEO and no real promotion, it had 300 unique visitors the first month and about 400 in May. Everyone involved with the project was delighted and it helped push forward a few other internal initiatives at CPI.
The site was no longer needed after July, and when I left in October, I continued to keep site ownership, though I have not decided what I wish to do with it. So I simply have left it alone, contemplating selling off the domain and the site.
So imagine my surprise when I see that the site is suddenly receiving a fair amount of traffic from Bing these past couple weeks of January, after all this is a site that has not had content updated in over 6 months.
I pull up my other sites, most notably the two primary ones I own and manage: www.michaelghurston.com and www.morbidgames.com. While my personal blog and portfolio of sorts here isn’t really a traffic go-getter, according to GA it hasn’t had a single user click through from Bing. Site traffic for this website is generated first by direct users, and secondly by Google.
Now Morbidgames is a different beast, as a site that has a larger community base with near 600 Facebook friends, multiple Twitter accounts nearing 2,000 followers and a host of online retailers that carry its products. The primary source of traffic to MG is by referring sites, with Google being a strong second and Twitter being third. However, GA reports that Bing is 5th on the list under direct visits.
So I’m curious.
Here we have Morbidgames, a site that’s index page uses AJAX to constantly feed in new content to the home page, and whose site is built around a WordPress backend that is updated at least every couple weeks if not more. Yet Bing isn’t really sending it traffic.
On the other hand, we have a site that hasn’t been updated in months and is getting a ton of traffic from Bing. Lastly we have a site that is updated every few days, with little SEO ever done that hasn’t received any traffic from Bing, but a trickle from Google.
So what’s the deal?
Is Bing prioritizing archived and older content over new content, seems unlikely with the push by search engines like Google and others who are looking into live search and value new content over old.
While it’s all just observations at this point, I think it’s worth looking into. Especially since I know that Morbidgames is by far more SEO’d and active than LasVegasCRENews.
