In a previous series of non-representative Search Engine Indexing tests, it was concluded that Yahoo was the fasted to index new content. My opinions on this have been revised in recent weeks. The scenario was that, due to an error on the server, the site www.drnicklowe.com has a session variable on it which redirected to another domain name, www.drnicklowe.co.uk on the first visit to the site. The .co.uk was not the primary domain name for the SEO of the site. The .co.uk domain redirected back to the .com which recognised that it was not a new session, and therefore did not redirect again. The error was spotted when the site dropped out of the search engine results altogether (google webmaster tools reported a 'redirct errror'. Therefore we had to do some urgent SEO work to get the site reindexed.

In the process of this, I monitored daily the SERPS to see if the site had been reincluded. We also resubmitted new sitemap.xml feeds to Google webmaster tools, Bing webmater tools and Yahoo site explorer. After a couple of days, the site reappeared in Bing. About a week later, the site reappeared in Google. We're still waiting for the site to reappear in Yahoo.

Therefore, the new conclusion is that Yahoo is the fastest to index new content on already established sites, but the slowest to index new sites. Bing is the fastest to include new sites and the second fastest to include new content on indexed sites. Its also worth noting that the SEO status of current websites always do better in Bing than it does in Google. We have several sites that are the top of Bing, but lower down on the first page in Google. Very few sites that show the opposite effect - although one notable example is this site which is now second in Google for Lincolnshire SEO, and only fifth in Bing. It's currently third in Yahoo. This is probably because I have targeted google for the SEO and not really done much work on targeting the other search engines.