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We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

codeium.com

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Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#31

Start with a robots.txt? https://www.codeium.com/robots.txt Update: I also see that you serve your site off GitHub... so that might be part of it as well? Bing might not index those sites?

A missing robots.txt has always meant "allow all", so it would be really weird for this to be the cause. Robots.txt is primarily for disallowing (or really, discouraging) crawlers from crawling certain paths.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#32
If you experience negative seo attacks against your site then being de-indexed by Bing/DDG at some point is to be expected. They are simply not as smart as Google in this respect.

You can go through the procedure of registering with their webmaster tools equivalent, submit a ticket and wait.

Or you can simply just wait.

In my limited experience (6 sites) the result was the same. Eventually it will resolve itself and you'll be back in the index, albeit with some very weird links showing up (an effect of the original attack). This does, at least, alert you to some vulnerabilities you may have previously been unaware of.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#33
post #16

Start with a robots.txt? https://www.codeium.com/robots.txt Update: I also see that you serve your site off GitHub... so that might be part of it as well? Bing might not index those sites?

Why would Bing require a robots.txt when all the other major search engines are fine with a sitemap.xml? Or are these separate somehow?

You're certainly getting a lot of free SEO help today. I'm not the one who has problems getting my site indexed, but it seems like they are different things.

  # Allowing all web crawlers access to all content
  User-agent: * 
  Disallow: 
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

At least you'll be able to look in your logs and see if BingBot is grabbing the file or not.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#34
post #28

There's loads of stuff that Bing doesn't index very well. If you turn of JS there's almost no actual text on the site; only the FAQ has any serious amount of text. This probably doesn't help. Having the page open also really slows down my laptop and constantly uses ~50%-75% CPU and ~130M memory. No idea if that's a factor, but it takes quite a lot of computing resources to actually make the homepage render any text a…

Oh interesting stats, we will look into that. We actually have lots of blog posts with text so not sure about that one though.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#36

4chan also does not show on Bing for me, but it does for some people it seems.

You weren't kidding. Even with "safe search" off, it doesn't appear there [0] LOL. However weird, maybe that's a good thing.

[0]: https://www.bing.com/search?q=4chan

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#37
post #29

honestly if you look at the incident history for github, coupled with the ham-fisted tantrum Bing throws if you ask for Chrome ("There's no need to download a new web browser.") , it feels pretty on-point to say Redmond is throwing knuckle sandwiches to stay in the running for any relevance on the internet these days https://www.githubstatus.com/history

"tantrum Bing throws if you ask for Chrome" is honestly a mild offense compared to the dang Windows 10 Operating System warning you that you that installing a non-Edge browser was going to make things slower and unsafe. I'm still grumpy about that one.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#38
post #16

Start with a robots.txt? https://www.codeium.com/robots.txt Update: I also see that you serve your site off GitHub... so that might be part of it as well? Bing might not index those sites?

Why would Bing require a robots.txt when all the other major search engines are fine with a sitemap.xml? Or are these separate somehow?

Because this is the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable, why not take the 5 minutes to add a robots.txt and then use https://www.bing.com/webmasters/robotstxttester to confirm that Bing can fetch/parse it?

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#39
post #6

For all the hate Google gets, it's crawlers are like 10x smarter than any other search engine. Wouldn't surprise me at all if there was some type of crawling issue that Google figured out and Bing didn't. This is a case where I'm not ready to attribute to malice what is very likely incompetence.

Operating 8.8.8.8 likely gives Google a near-complete list of every active domain on the internet, and new domains show up there the second any 8.8.8.8 user queries it - which is likely well before anyone links to it. I have no idea if Google use this data for hints to their crawler and indexer, but if I worked there I sure would.

This actually makes perfect sense! I've always wondered why they operate this service. There's nothing in the privacy policy that suggests they won't use the aggregated anonymized information for other purposes.

Re: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

#40
Last year, Bing and Edge erroneously flagged our website https://sheetjs.com/ as "dangerous": https://i.imgur.com/BvA3zrk.png

At the time, there was no "Safety Report" to indicate why Bing thought it was dangerous. The report page linked to https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bing-site-safety?url=https%3a%2... and it said "That web page doesn't exist"

To fix it, we had to register with "Bing Webmaster Tools" (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about) and raise a support ticket.

Within a few days, the issue "resolved itself". It's possible that raising a ticket forced some automatic refresh of the indexed data for the domain.

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