Frequency-smear phenomenon caused by fierce rotating speed variation made it difficult to extract the fault features of the rolling bearing. An approach based on time-frequency order tracking and SPWVD was proposed in this paper. The influence of speed variation was reduced by resampling the time-domain non-stationary signal at constant angle increments with order tracking analysis. The precision of instantaneous frequency estimation (IFE) in time-frequency order tracking was improved by the use of Smoothed Pseudo Wigner-Ville Distribution (SPWVD). The simulation signal and experiment on test-rig revealed that the proposed method was more effective than the traditional order tracking in clarifying incipient fault.