Bing blacklisting update
I have published two posts hear on Bear Blog about my main website project, The New Leaf Journal, having been blacklisted by Bing.
- De-indexed from Bing (1.17.23)
- Bing de-indexing update (1.18.23)
The Bing blacklisting not only persists, but has also become worse. I discovered in the Bing Webmaster Console that all of The New Leaf Journal's pages had been purged from Bing's index.
I subscribe to an RSS feed for Hacker News Page 1 in my feed reader. I saw an article titled Bing Jail a few days ago which caught my attention. In that post, a webmaster described his Bing blacklisting experience. I found that it was almost identical to my experience, right down to his site having been blacklisted in January 2023 and his pages being removed from Bing's index in March. He noted that several other independent writing sites, including a couple which probably receive more traffic than The New Leaf Journal, suffered the same fate.
His post inspired me to write my own comprehensive account of being blacklisted by Bing. I described how our experience is similar to the Bing Jail story and some minor differences. It seems that making Hacker News page one is one way to escape Bing jail. While I do not expect that my post will be shared or otherwise make page one, I figured that putting it out there may help when nothing else seems to.
I also tried sending another email inquiry to Bing. My first 5 or 6 returned no results, but I did receive an automated response for this one (I have not received an automated response for all of my support requests). Will it change anything? Probably not, but one can hope.
While Bing continues to ban my writing site, Google, Yandex, Brave, and Mojeek appear to have no concerns about indexing The New Leaf Journal and allowing people to find it via search. In fact, we have been doing fairly well on Google by our standards. Only Bing complains (and will not tell us why). As I explain my my Bing ban article, our biggest loss is not Bing itself, but instead DuckDuckGo, which is essentially a Bing front-end. I wrote about the danger of having most alternative search engines use Bing's search index in August 2022, well before the problem discussed affected The New Leaf Journal.