Over the past month I've been receiving reports left and right of broken links on Bing. Turns out that the new Bing refresh has basically just scraped data straight from Google including Google-specific UTMs (for the record I did NOT sync my GBP listings with Bing).
This wouldn't really bother me, as the data now matches perfectly between platforms, but the UTM formatting is broken, causing a 404 error on a significant chunk of my businesses. This issue also seems to appear and disappear at random, affecting different locations each week.
For example, this portion of my GBP UTM should look like:
utm_source=local&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=
But on the affected Bing listings it takes that same UTM, and formats it like this:
%3Futm_source%3Dlocal%26utm_medium%3Dorganic%26utm_campaign%3D
This altered UTM causes a 404 error and is extremely frustrating, given that it is popping up at random. It's also worth noting that I have a large number of my businesses on Bing already, with the correct Bing-specific UTMs in place on the dashboard. Reminder, I do not have Bing synced up with Google, so I did not cause this problem. I know that when you first sync your listings it will port over the Google UTM. Now Bing support was absolutely useless and attributed it to old data or 3rd-party sources (like your biggest competitor, Google?).
If anyone else has seen this issue please share your experience, and especially share any resolutions you may have found. At this point I feel like the only workaround is a redirect, but that's a big task given how many affected locations there are (and could be). Thanks for any help, and keep an eye out for this issue!
This wouldn't really bother me, as the data now matches perfectly between platforms, but the UTM formatting is broken, causing a 404 error on a significant chunk of my businesses. This issue also seems to appear and disappear at random, affecting different locations each week.
For example, this portion of my GBP UTM should look like:
utm_source=local&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=
But on the affected Bing listings it takes that same UTM, and formats it like this:
%3Futm_source%3Dlocal%26utm_medium%3Dorganic%26utm_campaign%3D
This altered UTM causes a 404 error and is extremely frustrating, given that it is popping up at random. It's also worth noting that I have a large number of my businesses on Bing already, with the correct Bing-specific UTMs in place on the dashboard. Reminder, I do not have Bing synced up with Google, so I did not cause this problem. I know that when you first sync your listings it will port over the Google UTM. Now Bing support was absolutely useless and attributed it to old data or 3rd-party sources (like your biggest competitor, Google?).
If anyone else has seen this issue please share your experience, and especially share any resolutions you may have found. At this point I feel like the only workaround is a redirect, but that's a big task given how many affected locations there are (and could be). Thanks for any help, and keep an eye out for this issue!
