Google is absolutely fine. A query for my site comes back with 10k results, I get approx 400k hits (not clicks) per month. My listing even got better after the recent search alogorithm update.

That's why I don't understand Bing - no content change, site online more than 20years, nothing special.

Same boat as Frankengolfer. Been online and in bing for over 10 years, nothing shady and a really good experience for site users with great metrics: good bounce rates, time on site, engagement. Perfectly fine in Google.

Only changes really are updates and small improvements to content and features over time (i.e. better mobile experience, improved/optimized images, slightly faster response times); Nothing major. I spend zero time building links or doing any type of promotion, links just come naturally.

edit to add: Number of indexed pages has not dropped in Bing Webmaster Tools. Other people reporting similar occurrences have shown their indexed pages drop. That's not the case with me.

I'm afraid most of the affected sites I've reviewed have something about them that could be seen as suspicious or unoriginal or low-quality or spammy or unhelpful or whatever, something that could trigger Bing's rather high-strung filters. It's usually on-site, I wouldn't worry so much about backlinks. Get a site review if you can. PM me if you dare ;-)

That's not to say there's necessarily any ill intent on the part of the site owner. In my case, it was a combination of technical issues (improperly configured 404s) and malware that wasn't really malware but raised a few too many flags to be considered safe (a repackaging of the files fixed that). Had to do quite a bit of digging to find and resolve those issues, but ultimately I have to say that Bing, while a little too high-strung perhaps, was probably right in acting on those issues.

no content change, site online more than 20years, nothing special

Your site may not change, but search engines are constantly evolving (for better or worse). The issues I had above existed for many years before Bing showed me the door.

Number of indexed pages has not dropped in Bing Webmaster Tools. Other people reporting similar occurrences have shown their indexed pages drop. That's not the case with me.

That's gotta be a different issue then. Nowhere to be found in the rankings or just (much) lower than on Google?

That's gotta be a different issue then. Nowhere to be found in the rankings or just (much) lower than on Google?

On results where I expect to see the site, there's a notice at the bottom of the page "Some results have been removed".

In Site Inspection when inspecting the URL, it just shows "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation." Under "Live URL", there's no SEO issues with the note "It can appear on Bing Search results given it passes quality checks and gets indexed by Bing".

Very interesting - the number of indexed pages started to grow since 5 days, from 0 by approx 200 / day, however I did not resubmit anyting. No clicks yet, Let's see what happens...

Regards,

Thomas

I'll also add that the parts of our site affected have no rhyme or reason. I've inspected every little aspect from the favicon to page speed to graphics usage, HTML tags (h1-h6, div, span, ul/li, ol/li, etc) to the very minimal AJAX/JavaScript features, etc.

Here's something for you with our robots.txt:

The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation.

Here's the (example'd) content of the robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Allow: /
Disallow: /example-1/
Disallow: /example-2/

To add to the confusion, bing still ranks several of our pages at #1 and even includes them as featured results (the thing with the lightbulb icon). But our 5 lines of robots.txt is somehow breaking their guidelines?

Wanted to add to this ridiculous story of mine. I've been wanting to get rid of some of our pages from bing's index, since our robots.txt is being ignored since its content is deemed to be against the guidelines (see last post).

So here's what the "Block URL" tool is reporting while attempting to get the entire directory out of the index:

We found that the URL submitted for block is important for Bing users and hence cannot be blocked through Bing Webmaster Tools.

We recommend the best way to block URLs in this scenario is to add NOINDEX meta-tag to the HTML header of the page.

This is getting beyond laughable.

Our 5 lines of robots.txt is apparently against their guidelines

The only suggestion by support is to redesign the entire site

Seemingly random parts of our site are de-indexed due to not following guidelines

The number of indexed pages in Webmaster Tools has never dropped, just impressions and clicks to zero

Site Explorer shows many pages don't follow guidelines, all squeeky clean and original

Site has done well in bing for around a decade

Started approx 1 year ago with subsequent drops a few times

Some stuff was listed under "Filter: URLs with Malware" but that's no longer the case

The less important stuff cannot be removed by Block URL tool because it's too important for bing users

Hi all,

indeed, the magic did happen - my site is back in the index. As I wrote three weeks ago, Bing started indexing my site all of a sudden. The number of indexed pages grew steadily (as of now 3.9k got indexed), however my website didn't get any clicks as it wasn't listed when searching for it.

This suddenly changed today - my stats are showing clicks and hits again. Didn't get any feedback or reply from Bing support though, let's see if it stays like that or if I will be kicked out of the index after a couple of days as it happened before.

Hey folks. I guess it's time for me to share some positive news after around 2 years of some of the most popular sections of our site being delisted from bing in several stages.

Here's what it looks like in Webmaster Tools
[i.imgur.com...]
[i.imgur.com...]

It's staggered, so different parts are slowly being re-indexed and beginning to rank. I'm hopeful sections like this will start getting old traffic levels like above:
[i.imgur.com...]

There are a few other key dates going a month back that look like the first two images.

Apart from consistently making small improvements over time and keeping with best practices for speed and usability (as I've done for years), I *did* make some experimental design changes a few months ago and stuck with it. It including tweaking font sizes, improving images, using different sized images for different screen sizes, finally completing migration to webp instead of png or jpeg, using every reputable tool I could find to make sure accessibility was very high and making sure content was easier to read (adding or improving headings, clearly separating sections, adding more unique images with captions, etc.)

edit to add: I forgot to mention that I also severely reduced the crawl rate at which bing should access our site, I reckon 2 months ago.

The 2 years without bing/yahoo!/ddg traffic to our most popular and helpful content has been a bit rough. In truth, I couldn't tell you what I did or didn't do to reverse our fortunes.

Hello,
I have a similar case not exactly the same.

I have all my pages indexed on bing but I see drops in the impressions on my webmaster tools console report. And the drops are cute big (around 50%).
The average position and CTR are stable but the impressions drop are making me suspicious.

I have noticed a huge increase in crawl requests if I compare the data to 6 months ago, like 6x-7x times the requests and then started to notice the decrease in the impressions ( and traffic ).
I am suspecting the IndexNow is related, I remember enabling it a few months ago, I can't remember exactly when but I think it was at that time.

Anyone experiencing something similar?