Hi all,

I am trying to investigate a bad case of a disappearing Bing site index. Unfortunately, Bing only keeps 6 months of index data, and it was not a very important source of traffic for me, so I did not investigate while it was hot. Now some of the data is from memory and printscreens I made almost 2 years ago.

So, long story short - many, many years ago I had a site hacked and the investigation, though inconclusively, pointed to the attack vector being thru Google cache. This, and also not seeing a reason for there to be a cache of my pages, I just slapped

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

onto all pages of my site. Or at least I thought that it was on all, but now I have discovered that one particular taxonomy of pages (only about 60 pages on a 250K page site) did not have its view updated, and the robots meta was just missing.

That was at least 5-6 years ago, if memory serves. I have never reconsidered the robots meta tag since.

Fast forward to December 15-ish, 2015. The amount of indexed pages in Bing started dropping like flies. In a matter of days it dropped from about 150K indexed to something like 15K, then slowly continued to drop until in a few months there were only 100 or so left. Traffic dried up completely.

So now, two years after the fact, I have started looking into it and discovered two things :

1. ONLY those pages that accidentally had no meta robots tags remain in the index
   
2. Bing Webmaster Portal labels pages with robots "noarchive" as "robot tag needs review", and most suspiciously, Severity High
   

I have removed the robots tags, but it is too early to tell if there are any changes.

So, the question to this esteemed group of people: has anyone come across issues with noarchive meta robots in Bing?

P.S. during this time Google index of that site had its ups and downs but never so drastic and in general seems unperturbed by the noarchive meta