Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website

codeium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 93 posts

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

#81

Post by aunch »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #73
jeroenhd wrote: post #45

Your website isn't quick to find by Duckduckgo or Qwant either. Yahoo doesn't seem to show much either. Startpage.com does find it, though. I do consistently get your VS Code addon in the first page of search results, though. When I open up your website I don't really see much. A brand name and some download links are all I can find. I'm not sure if there's much for search engines to find, really. Your homepage also…

Yeah even if their product is "better than Co-pilot", I will never use it after this brazen publicity stunt.

To each their own! We were motivated to blog about it by others who have had issues like this: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/solved-the-case-of-the-bing-b...

And at the end of the day, we got a lot of great SEO tips here. Thanks HN!

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

#82

Post by thaumaturgy »

I had an agency client in 2021 with an identical issue. In that case, the agency was able to contact a support representative for Bing's Webmaster Tools that provided a little more info, and some further investigation on my end revealed that the Bing crawler was doing something idiotic that was triggering http error response codes from the application, and the crawler took that to mean that the site was broken or down.

It was an intersection of multiple stupid things, not maliciousness.

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

#83

Post by nequo »

croes wrote: post #79
chairmanwow1 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah even if their product is "better than Co-pilot", I will never use it after this brazen publicity stunt.

Which publicity stunt? Not getting listed by Bing or tell about it?

> Which publicity stunt?

The one that they themselves admitted at the end of their post:

  Now, is it really because we compete with Github? Honestly, probably not, but controversy drums up interest and we need interest ...
Another way to get the SEO feedback that they claim that they were seeking is to start an "Ask HN" thread. Surely they would have received useful feedback without as much fanfare and the emotional manipulation.

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

#84

Post by krisroadruck »

Maybe try a 5 minute conversation with someone who does SEO for a living before writing up a conspiracy blog. You have essentially no backlinks to your brand new site. Popping you into ahrefs, it looks like you guys weren't even on the map until December. If I filter out the spam domains and isolate just domains that are at least DR 20 with any traffic at all and exclude subdomains, you have links from 16 domains and all but one are automated junk and non-editorial.

Additionally you have no robots.txt file, and your homepage has no self referencing canonical. TL;DR you don't show up in the index because you are not yet notable. Do some digital marketing.

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

#85

Post by krisroadruck »

krisroadruck wrote: post #84

Maybe try a 5 minute conversation with someone who does SEO for a living before writing up a conspiracy blog. You have essentially no backlinks to your brand new site. Popping you into ahrefs, it looks like you guys weren't even on the map until December. If I filter out the spam domains and isolate just domains that are at least DR 20 with any traffic at all and exclude subdomains, you have links from 16 domains and…

Also why do you have four H1's? You should have exactly 1, and on your home page it should be your brand name. This whole site is a mess. Instead of trying to be fancy I'd recommend you just make your marketing site on something like WordPress which is going to get 99% of this stuff right for you out of the box. You don't need React/Nextjs for a marketing brochure site and rolling your own solution when you don't know understand the fundamentals is not going to lead to a good result.

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

#87

Post by jsnell »

not2b wrote: post #61
jsnell wrote: post #57

> Now, is it really because we compete with Github? Honestly, probably not, but controversy drums up interest and we need interest so that someone out there on the Internet can tell us what we're doing wrong. It's pretty slimy to imply in the clickbait title that you're being blocked due to competing with MS, when you know well that it's not the reason. Admitting it's clickbait in the last paragraph doesn't make it a…

How does he know well that this is not the reason? No explanation has been given for Bing's very different treatment of the site than Google's. He says "probably not" because he isn't assuming guilt, but it may well be relevant.

To put it bluntly, while these guys might think they're competing with Github, the inverse is unlikely to be true. Nobody has heard of them until now. Their search volume on Google Trends doesn't even register compared to Copilot:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Now, there is no shame in not having the top product in your niche. Everyone needs to start somewhere! But for somebody at Bing to risk going against their stated policies and blocklist a competitor, they at a bare minimum need to be somebody MS would consider a competitor. Clearly not the case here.

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

#88

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

aunch wrote: post #76
misterbwong wrote: post #63

This is pure clickbait and really doesn't leave a good impression of this team. Writing a whole article implying they're not being indexed because they are a Github Copilot competitor when they, themselves, don't believe it is farcical. Title: We compete with GitHub. Bing does not show our website FTA: Now, is it really because we compete with Github? Honestly, probably not, but controversy drums up interest and we n…

I understand the sentiment and why it might come across that way, but we genuinely have gotten a lot more reasonable pointers in these comments than we were able to rack our brains about. And it seems like SEO attacks, Bing incompetence, and Bing actually going after some terms (like Chrome) actually have happened, and the main point here was that we genuinely don't get any feedback from Bing.

> but we genuinely have gotten a lot more reasonable pointers in these comments than we were able to rack our brains about

So the ends justifies the means?

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

#89

Post by lee101 »

Looks like this post is flagged too... I'm also competing with you/co pilot with https://text-generator.io but I'm on Bing, take a deep look into your site/SEO etc and tip of the day for generative companies like ours is that we can generate a whole bunch of examples for SEO.

Normally HN and Reddit are less moderated than other sites that do a lot of shadow banning, condolences for getting stomped on by large co's and also welcome to the internet

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

#90

Post by vitorgrs »

arp242 wrote: 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…

There's a lot of stuff that Google doesn't index too, btw, that Bing do. I think what we all need to agree is that... different search index will inevitable have different results anyway.
Post reply on HN