[HN Gopher] Bing Jail
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       Bing Jail
        
       Author : idarek
       Score  : 93 points
       Date   : 2023-04-23 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dariusz.wieckiewicz.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dariusz.wieckiewicz.org)
        
       | pixelesque wrote:
       | Bing crawler does in my limited experience seem pretty picky...
       | It doesn't even seem to be able to follow HTTP->HTTPS 308
       | redirects on one of my sites (it has successfully indexed
       | another) - it makes requests to http:// for my site, gets a 308
       | redirect to https://, and then does nothing with that, other than
       | robots.txt requests.
        
         | 2h wrote:
         | because thats not the right way to do that. just look at the
         | site you are on right now:                   > curl -i
         | http://news.ycombinator.com/         HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
         | Permanently         Location: https://news.ycombinator.com/
        
       | morkalork wrote:
       | Does MS give/sell crawl data to OpenAI?
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | preommr wrote:
       | A few weeks since Bing came back from the oblivion as a possible
       | search contender and already we're getting the "big company can
       | screw you over and there's nothing you can do about it".
       | 
       | This was/is a problem with Google (search, youtube, gcp etc.)
       | where people's income relies on these services and the company
       | just doesn't care. I've seen a bunch of posts on HN about
       | problems like this where the comments are full of other people
       | sharing similar stories.
       | 
       | It's depressing, but the takeaway is to be smart about keeping
       | content separate between domains and being prepared for the
       | hammer to fall at any moment.
        
       | idarek wrote:
       | A short story on how my website lost all indexed pages in Bing,
       | affecting my presence in DuckDuckGo, secret blacklisting and
       | classification as a splog by Bing AI
        
         | nafnlj wrote:
         | Very good article -- I am having the exact same issues (I run a
         | lightweight writing site with original writing and no ads). One
         | thing that caught my attention is the timing. Bing blacklisted
         | my domain from web search results on January 14 after I had no
         | issue with them for 2.5 years (interestingly, I wasn't fully
         | blacklisted for image results but that doesn't help me much).
         | The rest of your article, from lack of support and information
         | to Bing Webmaster only identifying minor SEO issues has been my
         | experience. My site has no indexing issues with Google, Yandex,
         | Brave, or Mojeek... so whatever it is is Bing-specific. I agree
         | with your point on DDG too. I also had more DDG traffic than
         | Bing traffic, and losing a smaller number of Ecosia, Qwant, and
         | Yahoo referrals is also unfortunate. Many people do not realize
         | how many of the alternative search tools rely on Bing's index.
         | 
         | Whatever is causing it -- I hope it is fixed soon.
        
           | idarek wrote:
           | Thanks!
        
         | dazc wrote:
         | Sites are delisted from Bing & DDG as a result of negative SEO
         | attacks. I've experienced this multiple times and responded to
         | a couple of threads on HN about it.
         | 
         | The attacker doesn't care about your Bing listing, it's an
         | unintended coincidence of an attempt to get your site deindexed
         | from Google search that doesn't work.
         | 
         | Google ignore bad links to your site, Bing don't.
         | 
         | After two years I can confidently conclude that MS have done a
         | great job of hiding this 'defect' and virtually nothing
         | regarding the root cause.
         | 
         | In my experience, the sites come back on their own eventually
         | but with a lot of really weird URLs being indexed first (a sure
         | sign of the original attack).
        
           | nothingeasy wrote:
           | Wow, TIL "negative SEO attacks."
        
             | nadermx wrote:
             | Has happened to my site as well, I gave up after doing
             | around the same thing..
             | https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Apdf.to
        
               | nixcraft wrote:
               | I think that is not the correct syntax. I just search for
               | redhat.com and suse.com
               | 
               | https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aredhat.com
               | 
               | https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Asuse.com
        
               | mdaniel wrote:
               | It must be doing some kind of personalization for you,
               | because when I load those two links in an incognito
               | window, the first page is made up entirely of links to
               | the constrained domains. That differs from the parent's
               | link which in an incognito window just displays some kind
               | of bing-looking error message
        
               | tough wrote:
               | Seems like a great extortion business
               | 
               | /s
        
         | 2h wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
       | nitwit005 wrote:
       | If I translate the main page from Polish, it has text that
       | resembles what you'd expect from scams: "Quidco - collect your
       | PS10", "Wise - transfer PS500 for free", etc. There's even a bit
       | of preface text that seems to acknowledge some content sounds a
       | bit a like a scam: "I've never been too sure about sites that
       | offer so-called Cashback"
        
         | dmix wrote:
         | Seems to be a reference to this blog post?
         | 
         | https://dariusz.wieckiewicz.org/quidco/
         | 
         | The big question is if Bing will reindex it later, assuming
         | this is the problem content (who knows).
         | 
         | Sidenote: What is "cashback shopping"? I'm familiar with credit
         | cards that do that but not websites. Is it scammy?
        
       | rubenwardy wrote:
       | I've had this exact same issue for the last year, Bing support
       | have been useless. I'll do the same and write a blog post
        
         | idarek wrote:
         | Share the link if you do. Would like to read through your
         | thoughts.
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-23 23:01 UTC)