Site completely Blocked by Bing, How long until Bing Team responses?

[reblaus]

Hi,
We got completely dropped out of the Bing index 10 days ago and all our efforts in getting an answer on why this happened or how this can be fixed are not answered by Bing Support.

We run a technology news and shopping Magazine since over 10 years and have been in Bing since it exists.

As Bing powers Yahoo, we now run only on Google traffic.

Any help is very much appreciated.

[ByronM]

Do you run the bing webmaster tools? does it show anything for your site?

[reblaus]

yes i run it, but there is no message on what is happening. it still seems to crawl the site. it shows that traffic is 0.
The only odd thing was the force recrawl errors that happened two weeks ago, but i read that others sites saw that too.

[mack]

Have you made any changes to the site that may be the cause?

Mack.

[RhinoFish]

[searchengineland.com...]

[bingdude]

Care to share a domain reblaus?

[reblaus]

Thanks Rhino Fish for the link, i have not seen that article, but pretty sure we got caught by this eyebrow raising action. To block the guys who invented Cyber Monday is an interesting move. Black Friday and Cyber Monday needs lots of good content to guide consumers to the great deals and away from the bad ones. We guide consumers through that biggest US sales season since years.

To get blocked for that is really weird and also seeing Bing's own cyber Monday and black friday offerings promoted is bewildering and throws a very bad light on bing.

Cyber Monday and Black Friday is over. Why are these sites and us still blocked?

bingdude, i send you a sticky mail with our URL now.

[reblaus]

hi Bingdude,
Did you get my sticky note with the URL? As far as i know its against webmaster policy to post links to own sites in the comments.

Any ideas on how we can get this block lifted?

[bingdude]

I did get it - and have forwarded a question tot he team internally - until they respond, there's not much we can do. As you can imagine, they are a busy group, so reponses can sometimes take a while. :(

[reblaus]

I appreciate your help though very much.

thanks for the effort!

[talismon]

We were blocked as well, traffic started a steep decline mid November and we are not even showing up for our domain. What is showing up are news articles referencing us, and Forbes released two this week.

@bingdude - we've submitted a detailed request via WMT so I'm keep my fingers crossed we get reviewed soon. I'll sticky you the site, any help appreciated!

[reblaus]

good news. our site is back in the bing index. I do not know about the ranking and i also do not know if the site is also a bing news source again.

[reblaus]

maybe this was premature. There are some pages now in the index when using site:<domain>, but the homepage and most other major content section are missing - so i dont know what is going on.

[talismon]

@reblaus - we're seeing the same thing. We still have a small % of pages indexed but none of main pages or index pages. Traffic is up over the last few days but still at about 10% of where we were a few weeks ago.

[reblaus]

talismon, this is interesting that you see the same thing. i dont see any change today. Bingdude, any idea what is going on?

[laptopmd]

I'm having similar problems (I work with a laptop repair company in New York City) and it appears others are as well: [bing.com...] -- with our site being removed from SERPs but not totally ignored by Bing.

Bing is still crawling my site and from what I can tell I haven't necessarily been blocked.

I originally thought the fluctuation was because of a site relaunch in early November but as time wears on and resubmitting sitemaps and double checking redirects yields zero results, I'm wondering different.

Even doing a site search in Bing shows a few results (interesting thing is that Aussie site shows different than Bing USA) which leads me to believe that we haven't been completely removed.

Our Bing traffic has dropped to zero but we are still being consistently crawled and indexed though at a slower rate.

[reblaus]

Bingdude, It would be really great to get some feedback on what is going on. Should I just forget about Bing or will eventually get someone back to me on why we are still not back in the index?

[bingdude]

I have nothing to update with. Most folsk are on holidays right now, so the work on specific items has slowed, as expected.

Until they ping me back - which sometimes doesn't happen - I cannot shed any further light on things.

[websitehandyman]

I found this thread after search for the topic.

I too had all the site on one VPS fall out of indexing on Bing, this happened at the same time as others have said on here mid November.

Since about then I've had to battle Bing support to try and get answers. The first 5 or 6 replies kept saying the site wasn't blocked, this was simply because the support staff just didn't know how to search the Bing index.

Once I had proven the site were in Bing and then had fallen off it was sent to the back support to investigate. But there yet again, although I had emails telling me they were looking into it and I should expect a response in 84 / 24 hours I still had to chase it up after waiting another 3 weeks.

The response I got "Upon further review, we have identified that a block is in place against your site as we are seeing that your domain, http://www.example.com/ is associated with bunch of irrelevant/spammy sites."

I would suggest this is a bit less then the sort of professional reply I had hoped for. Apart from never resorting to spam my site is very relevant but even if it wasn't what is that got to do with Bing.

They way they talk about other sites its as if my site has been punished for either linking to them or from them. But I don't know which they are talking about. My site does not have what you might call "risky" links on it and I can't stop other linking to it. About the worst any of the sites on the server has is affilaite links - no one ever got hung for that.

The reply goes on to suggest I make changes to the SEO of the site. Fact is the whole site was redesigned after Bing banned it, it's all totally new data and SEO. Did they recheck ? or have they just sent the response to cover their backs for doing nothing all this time ?

This is a site that is ranked 3 in Google and before bing combined the site had 70,000 pages in yahoo. So I've lost a lot of traffic and a lot of money.

I suspect they have put in a subnet ban to stop spammers and my VPS had the misfortune to be moved to that same subnet in November as all the sites on the VPS have fallen off Bing at the same rate and the same time.

I've asked for clarity as I don't participate in the black arts of Seo. I have customers who wouldn't know where to start on that subject but the only action I can take to try and resolve this is move hosts. That means 20+ site, 8 customers.

[edited by: tedster at 2:12 am (utc) on Jan 17, 2012]
[edit reason] change domain name to example.com [/edit]

[Staffa]

"Upon further review, we have identified that a block is in place against your site as we are seeing that your domain, is associated with bunch of irrelevant/spammy sites."

That's rich coming from a company which wastes much of its resources crawling web sites with common UAs and even malformed UAs

[websitehandyman]

Well fair dues to Bing, I've just heard back and the assure me the IP or subnet is not blocked. They are adiment that the site links to known spam sites from the home page.

As I said the site has been completely reworked since this block and the only link on the home page are internal except two, both of which are adverts which were neither there in Nov or can be class as spam or evenly lightly "black art seo"

[websitehandyman]

I've once again heard back from Bing, they say my site is blocked due to someone linking to it. How the hell can I be held responsible for other people's actions.

At my wits end with this one, this morning I visited all the sites I have access to and deleted any links to any of the sites on the same server or could look as if they were control by me. I hope this solves the problem but none of these were any any way spam or even suspect.

I have always thought links into a site could not harm it, so I must be wrong. It seems anyone with the right site can really fug you over if they want to and you can do nothing about it.

I think if my site is not unblocked by Bing I'll concider linking to all my competitors sites and hope that levels the playing field :-)

Sad thing is last year some crook registered the same name in a different type. Mine is .com they registered .co.uk. This was soley to leach on my brand.

I don't have the money to stop them and now their site is top for the keywords in Bing simply because my site is blocked. My site ranks 3/10 in google and thier's is nowhere - who says crooks don't prosper ? it seems they do on Bing.

[reblaus]

that is really disturbing. My site is on the web since over 10 years, which means i have a huge number of backlinks. There is no way to manage who is linking to us. On top of that we get scraped left and right. To DMCA all of them would take ages.

bingdude, what is your take on this response? Can you please tell your colleagues to start talking to webmasters to learn how life is running a website on the world "wild" web.

PS: I still did not hear from Bing, why we got blocked.

[websitehandyman]

It is disturbing, we have about 500 sites linking in and maybe millions of pages. I've been making sites for nearly 20 years and this is the first time I've encounters any sort of ban and never expected this one on this site.

To be frank it stinks, some of my sites are affilate trash as some people might call it, but this one is not. I've always trod a very carefull line with this one for the following reason;

I have the niggling worry that it's not about the site at all. A month of so before this ban I had a big company warning me about the domain name I had chosen to use. I am prepared to take that fight to court because I know I will win but I also suspect they know that too and haven't come back for more. So perhaps some influance used somewhere ? I would hate to think so.

[tangor]

Possibility that a DMCA has been taken out against you? Just asking if you've checked that out.

[websitehandyman]

No DMCA not likely.

I think I may have had my last contact from Bing Support if this is anything to go by;

"Thank you for writing back. However, as what had been mentioned, we are not in liberty to provide further information with regard to sites that are linking to your site.

We apologize if we are not able to provide further assistance with regard to this issue.

Thank you for your time and patience. "

I don't see how I'm supposed to clear my name now with regards Bing anyway. Luckerly Google don't have a problem with the site and traffic from there is improving.

[tangor]

Whoa! If that is a direct quote from Bing there's a large number of grammatical errors which I would not expect.

[websitehandyman]

I just copy and paste from the email, I'm the last to moan about that sort of thing I assure you.

[tangor]

What I meant is the message does not sound like upper tier (management level) correspondence. I'd ask for a "supervisor!".

[reblaus]

websitehandyman, how did you get passed the standard blocking answer?

i just got again (3rd or 4th time since November) this feedback when inquiring about the blocking.

"We apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused you. However, it appears that your request is still being investigated by our Product Group. Once information becomes available, we will immediately be contacting you back."