Bing Indexing NoIndex/Nofollow Content

Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 10:46

Bing’s webmaster forum has a number of posts where people are complaining that Bing will not index their content. Some people, however, are having the opposite problem. Content that they do not want indexed by Bing is being indexed by Bing, despite the webmaster’s efforts to keep it out of the search engine.

One person posted about this, and a Microsoft employee responded, admitting that this is an issue on Bing’s side. Here’s how the conversation goes:

Webmaster:

I have a site containing pages that I don’t want their content being indexed by search engines so all of those pages have

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />

in their header and it has been like this for a while now.

Both Google and Yahoo respected the tag and those pages are not being indexed by them but today I checked and found all those pages even recent ones are indexed and cached on Bing.

Program Manager, Bing Webmaster Center:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

Others have complained recently that Bing and (in some cases) even Yahoo have been ignoring NoIndex and Nofollow in meta tags. Have you experienced any similar issues?

Did you have any similar “glitches” at Bing?