bobbyhiltz.com
Bing Bunged Bobby's Blog
Has this ever happened to _you_?
You check your private messages and emails and have one that says:
> Your site doesn’t show up on Bing!
_“Hmmm… that can’t be true”_ , you think to yourself, but when you check… It is, in fact, true.
**You’ve been de-Bing’d!**
_Oh, the shame…_
Well, folks, don’t dispair. I’ve been where you are. In fact, I am where you are, or have been, now! My little footprint on the web has been paved over and erased from Bing (and consequently DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Yahoo, and a bunch of other metacrawlers that use Bing).
## Why
I’m not a developer, so I cannot get deep into diagnosing this issue. Here is what I came up with in order of probability:
1. I did something to my site that is preventing it from being indexed.
2. I wrote something on my site that violates Bing’s rules.
3. I linked to something on my site that violates Bing’s rules.
4. Something else?
## Did I break it?
Since I am not a web developer at all, I tend to _fiddle around_ and test things out quite a bit. Don’t be thinking that I’m doing experimental stuff on my site, because I am not. The most complicated things I had to figure out were Webmentions and microformats. I might have accidentally copied a line or forgot to close a bracket that could affect parts of the site. The site loads, though. And many of the tools I have tried testing it with return positive hits.
**Likelihood: LOW**
## Have I posted something inappropriate?
My last seven posts have been about games. It would be surprising if something within those posts was enough to have my entire blog de-Bing’d. I did write something about a “strategic AI plan” to invest in CSAM and plagiarism that could be a bit spicy. That was in July, though, and if someone were to read it they’d see it doesn’t condone those appalling things.
**Likelihood: LOW**
## Did I share something inappropriate?
This is easy. I know of a site or two that contain links to stuff that is illegal in some countries. Those sites are still indexed (although they no longer load, so perhaps they’ve been blocked in France?). To be thorough, I made sure that the last 25 sites I shared on my bookmarks page are indexed. They appear to be.
**Likelihood: LOW**
## What’s left?
* The number of 404’s on my site is 7 (_I’ll fix it when I fix it!_).
* My `robots.txt` allows Bingbot.
* Cloaking: Nope. First time I’ve ever heard the word used in this context.
* Link Schemes and Artificial Promotion : Nope.
* Duplicate Content Across Multiple URLs: Nada.
* Scraped or Republished Content Without Added Value: Zip.
* Keyword Stuffing and Artificially Engineered Language: No.
* Automatically Generated Content at Scale: Haha, no.
* Affiliate Programs Without Sufficient Value: No.
* Malicious Behavior: Nah.
* Misleading Structured Data : Nope.
* Prompt Injection and AI Manipulation: No no no.
**Was I was de-Bing’d for no reason?**
I had spent an afternoon looking for technical reasons. I should have looked for other users who had the same issue…
* Removed From Bing and DuckDuckGo by Michael Tsai
* My website disappeared from Bing and DuckDuckGo &
* My website disappeared from Bing and DuckDuckGo, Part 2 by Jesse Squires
* Microsoft Bing - site gone from SERP overnight! by Bike Gremlin
It isn’t that I hate pretending to be a webdev troubleshooting an issue, but I did waste part of an afternoon doing just that. I even created an account just to look at the stupid Bing Webmaster Tools.
It says the URL can appear on Bing, yet, **_the URL is not appearing on Bing_**.
Indexed Successfully?
**Likelihood of being de-Bing’d for no reason: HIGH**
## Next Steps
1. Post this complaint.
2. Do nothing.
3. Continue writing posts.
4. RemindMe! 3 months “Check Bing & DuckDuckGo”
