Removed From Bing and DuckDuckGo
It turns out that my business web site was removed from Bing, which explains why it’s missing from DuckDuckGo.
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According to the link in the results, “Bing limits removal of search results to a narrow set of circumstances and conditions to avoid restricting Bing users’ access to relevant information.” Yet none of these circumstances would seem to apply to my web site, so it’s a mystery.
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A few other people I know, including Jesse Squires, have also seen their web sites mysteriously removed from Bing and DuckDuckGo. Jesse’s site is still missing! Jesse’s blog post links to a blog post by Chase Watts, Affiliate Manager at GoDaddy, who explains an exploit in Bing that allows website owners to deindex competitors, so it’s possible that this is what happened to me.
A whole thread full of people whose web sites have been inexplicably removed from Microsoft Bing and search engines that rely on Bing, such as DuckDuckGo.
Other people, myself included, are seeing problems where sites are clearly not removed, but neither do they seem to be fully indexed.
@gruber using the DuckDuckGo search in your archive section returns very limited results. I believe it used to be better. I’ve noticed this for my website that uses their search engine as well.
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Also strange: a search term may not have any results return, but if I reload the page multiple times, search results appear eventually.
Previously:
Update (2022-06-24): Jeff Johnson:
Myself and @jesse_squires are both restored to Bing and DuckDuckGo.
No explanation given.
Update (2022-07-26): Jesse Squires:
I originally discovered and wrote about the issue in late March. Jeff published his post a few months later in June. I also received a number of emails and tweets from readers facing the same problem. It really felt like everyone was having this issue. Yet, no one — including DuckDuckGo’s own CEO — seemed to know what the fuck was going on.
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[Bing] confirmed my site committed so-called violations, but refused to tell me what.
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Fast forward almost exactly one month after Bing Support’s response. Ostensibly and miraculously my site is no longer violating Bing’s guidelines.
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However, results on DuckDuckGo still seem incomplete compared to what they used to be, especially compared to Google.
Update (2022-08-02): Relja Novović (via Jeff Johnson):
My websites just got erased from their search results – overnight!
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The first question to ask when something like this happens is: “what did you do/change/update?” The answer is, as far as I remember and can tell – nothing.
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To add insult to injury, when you “Google” the term “BikeGremlin” on Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo, SERPs show BikeGremlin social-media accounts and results from a website “bikehow.com” that has literally copied my articles and re-published them!
Update (2022-11-01): Nicolas Magand:
This week, I tried one more time to get in touch with Bing support, I guess this makes it the seventh or eighth time. In a couple of days, I expect to receive a generic email saying that my website doesn’t follow Bing’s guidelines, without saying anything more, even if my website apparently follows every guideline. I have a background in SEO, I write original content, I have a very clean website, I use Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console, and I can’t find anything wrong. I can’t find any reason for this removal. I can’t find any solution to this problem. Clearly, this is a Bing issue, and they are extremely bad at fixing it, or at least point their users to the right direction.
Update (2023-01-18): Dave Rupert (Hacker News):
Why on earth would Bing not index my site at all? To solve this, I took the first step and signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to try to know what Bing knows about my site and sure enough: zero clicks, zero impressions, and zero indexed pages for my site. Awful.
Sure enough, https://underpassapp.com is now missing again from both Bing and DuckDuckGo!
My personal site https://lapcatsoftware.com was never removed from Bing or DuckDuckGo. Only my business site is missing.
Update (2023-08-18): Nick Heer (Mastodon):
[This] appears to be a somewhat common issue where Bing — and, consequently, the many small search engines which rely on its results — will completely de-index a website for no apparent reason. Bing still shows zero results for a query for
site:techdirt.com, though it does again say “some results have been removed” and links to a generic help page.
