Are you still getting visits from Bingbot?

Yes, regularly. And according to Webmaster Tools (link above), the number of pages in the index is steady even after the number of clicks has suddenly dropped to zero. So, still indexed and getting crawled (Crawl Requests stats in Webmaster Tools also steady), just booted from the SERPs, it seems.

a bit heavier on the ads lately

How much heavier?

Have you checked your competition? Are you seeing any changes in the niche itself?

How much heavier?

I've always been fairly conservative when it comes to ad placement. Now it's on par with the competition. For example, there's a site with a very similar name that continues to rank on Bing (and probably profits from the disappearance of my site). It has slightly more aggressive advertising, so I guess that's unlikely to be the reason.

Have you checked your competition? Are you seeing any changes in the niche itself?

I haven't watched Bing results closely, but I tried various queries and everything looks normal in the niche, except the most popular site (mine) is now missing.

Hard to diagnose without specifics, of course. And perhaps it's just a fluke of the AI, but still something must be triggering it. Hope to get a response soon.

Was hoping for success stories ;-)

My website has almost the same problem as yours: starting from November 20th, the ranking has been dropping, and there is basically no traffic until now.

url:example.com, found that my website has been deleted by bing.

In the support email, BING replied that it violated the BING WEBMASTER Guide, but did not give any special reports.

But Google Search has always been normal, and Yandex search is also normal.

I am checking for any violations of the BING WEBMASTER Guide.

Thanks for sharing, Ethan Rob, and sorry you're having similar troubles with Bing. Interesting that the timeline is roughly the same.

How long did it take for you to get a response from them? They say within 10 days but I'm fast approaching 20.

one week.

Oh my goodness, so glad I found this thread! Same story here, November 13th website just disappeared from Bing SERPS. It has ranked highly for well over ten years without an issue. It is still indexed and crawled, but just disappeared from SERPS. I imagined some sort of manual penalty, perhaps?

I contacted support as well and received a reply on November 30

"I reviewed your site but unfortunately when I was investigating, I saw that your site is still under going through validation which can be a reason why we are not indexing it. I am checking with my team. I will update you once I hear back from them."

The reply went on to suggest checking Bing webmaster guidelines.

I replied Dec 4th that I could not see an issue according to guidelines. I have not heard back as yet.

I have asked what they mean by "still under going through validation" (I assume mean "still under going validation" or "still going through validation")

I do wonder what they mean by validation? The website has been in the Bing SERPS for over ten years and never had a problem. Standard WP site with approximately monthly updates.

Anyway I'm just happy to find out I'm not alone! A problem shared is a problem halved and all that!

I look forward to hearing if any of us get a resolution!

Thanks for that, jbnz.

From all the reports I've read, it seems fairly typical to get unhelpful answers from Bing support, especially at first. There seems to be a support layer in front of the people who actually know their stuff. Outsourced perhaps. Case in point: your site is still indexed and crawled, but not ranking, and you get a response back saying "[validation] can be a reason why we are not indexing it" (emphasis mine). Clearly they didn't pay much attention to the question and/or they don't have the knowledge or tools for a proper assessment.

With validation, perhaps they're referring to domain validation in Webmaster Tools? Wouldn't know what else it could be.

Apparently Bing has a "spam list" (so called by their own support team) that sites can end up on. I don't know if that's a manual or automatic penalty, but apparently it's not easy to get off of it, even when the site in question is obviously not spam. I'm inclined to think it's manual because it's done so arbitrarily, but on the other hand it's hard to imagine how the site mentioned here [michaelhorowitz.com] could have been manually penalized.

In any case, it all feels rather amateurish for the #2 search engine.

Can I ask what industry your sites are in? Tech, like mine, or something else? Do the sites run ads? If you use AdSense, is Auto-Ads enabled?

Hey guys, i have got to the point where I don't get a response at all. From the responses i saw that my emails were getting escalated and it got to a point after where I am not getting any reply at all. I am pretty sure, there is a guy handling hundreds and thousands of these requests and the bots/farms they are using are falsly flagging the website.

This only happened to me after using Ezoic?Cloudflare. Did you guys make any change before you're website got delisted?

Did you guys make any change before you're website got delisted?

I enabled Auto-Ads about 4-5 weeks before Bing dropped the site, and more recently I stopped showing ads to users in countries with very low RPMs. No other changes, no Cloudflare or Ezoic.

Re-submitted the request and got a quicker response this time. Apparently it's now been escalated to the engineering team.

Let me know the response as I am not sure what to do anymore! 7 years of hard work, now its put me back few years! Now if google decides to go against my site, game over! LOL :D

@robzilla - appreciate the update, it was good to hear. I have heard nothing since the original response re 'validation'. I have just sent a second follow-up request. I'll try a re-submission if the follow-up doesn't do the trick.

@xnokia5200 - no changes to the website

Hi,
Same problem with a historic site. Cloudflare hosting. Problem starting from November 13th.
They replied that they are investigating.

About a month after the first support request:

Thank you for your patience!

After further review, it appears that your site [...] did not meet the standards set by Bing the last time it was crawled. Post a re-review, we confirm that your website continues to be in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

Please review our Webmaster Guidelines [bing.com], especially the section Things to Avoid [bing.com], and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results. Post complying with the webmaster guidelines you can submit your URL using URL Submission feature to get them recrawled.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions or concerns and I would be more than happy to assist.

Why one support request would result in the above and the other (for the same site and issue) in escalation to the engineering team, I do not know.

They're not going to tell me what's wrong, so I'm inclined to give up. They continue to crawl the site, so maybe they'll come to their senses one day.

Pretty sure they answered the question and gave hints. The actual section to read CAREFULLY is this:

Cloaking:
Link Schemes, Link Buying, Link Spamming :
Social media schemes:
Duplicate content:
Scraped Content:
Keyword Stuffing OR loading pages with irrelevant keywords:
Automatically generated content:
Affiliate programs without adding sufficient value:
Malicious behavior:
Misleading structured data markup:

These are VERY PRECISE and if one takes an honest look at their site could find exactly where they fall afoul of the above.

YMMV

Would that it were so simple. Like jbnz above, I've carefully reviewed the site and found no violations. Asked a few others for an objective view, turned up nothing. I'm pretty white-hat, don't usually get into trouble, so all the schemes and black-hat tricks in the list are irrelevant. And yet Bing now suggests I request another review only after I make "significant changes" to the site, which suggests they think there's a rather large, perhaps even fundamental problem. I guess Google just hasn't caught on to me yet!

Thought about trying to locate the review session in my access logs, maybe that would point me to Bing's problem area, but that's a needle in the haystack, and it's possible they rely mostly on internal data and tools anyway.

Will post back when I get a reponse to the other, escalated support ticket.

One thing that I discovered is Bing/Microsoft uses click farms to flag websites, after finding this out I gave up trying to fix this since there is no fix. From what i have read on the forums is that there are third-party users or contractors that do this as a job, flagging websites. So it makes sense that they just flag whatever they don't understand or feel like is a adsense farm website. Check if the month that your website was removed from the search results, you received traffic from this site, prod.uhrs.playmsn.com and visiting the site it makes more sense that something like that must have happened and Microsoft does not care at all until and unless a big websites are affected which probably will be resolved and taken care of straight away.

@robzilla ... Please keep us informed!

Of that list from bing, these are the ones that cause many to be caught out, even with white hats:

Link Schemes, Link Buying, Link Spamming :
Social media schemes:
Keyword Stuffing OR loading pages with irrelevant keywords:
Misleading structured data markup:

The last one is probably the one most abused, misused, or least understood. THEN AGAIN, bing just might have it wrong and there's nothing you can do!

I also suspect that they use third party services to monitor.
Our network has generated billions of impressions (true and verified). If microsoft has chosen this methodology it is my freedom to block all my sites on their search engine.

Check if the month that your website was removed from the search results, you received traffic from this site, prod.uhrs.playmsn.com

I've been getting visits through that referral every month since at least 2018, and not in the days before the site was banned (last visit 10 days prior).

The timing is interesting, isn't it? Not likely a coincidence that for at least 3 of us in this thread, this started on November 13.

(It started sometime on the 12th, the 13th was the first day without any Bing traffic.)

Haven't had more than a handful of hits from bing in years.

I'll chime in here since there hasn't been much added recently.

A site we run was recently dropped from Bing search (Nov 22-23) with the message "Some results have been removed". Contacting them wasn't very helpful and they just suggested there weren't enough links to our site to make it into the results. That's baloney.

Digging further, it appears that the "Filter: URLs with Malware" in Site Explorer is giving us some hints.

I reckon this might be a huge bug, as we've run full audits and the few lines of JavaScript in use surely shouldn't be flagged as malware; they're present on other sites that have not been removed.

The human evaluations triggered when you compete for new ground seem to be getting brutal, in my opinon. Sites remaining stable for years and then crashing after an improvement are numerous. Might the problem be a biased human review(er) simply not liking the smell of your content, even if it's valid and of quality?

We are studying the situation.
Filtering for malware there are completely valid and original url, it is very difficult to understand technically. There are also auto-generated or very old urls which all give 404.
Another strange thing in the keywords are listed many searches (?) like:

keyword // php = site: com

It looks like the engine has indexed anything over all these years that has never been updated.

We are honestly disappointed. In email, the same person always replies with useless suggestions.

Digging further, it appears that the "Filter: URLs with Malware" in Site Explorer is giving us some hints.

Damn, how did I miss that? Maybe I was using the Site Explorer wrong. Almost half of the site is listed there, with the vast majority of those not even linking to any files that could be malware (and the ones that do are totally safe). The site isn't hacked, and any js is custom and pretty basic.

When Bing detects malware (whether correctly or not), they can do a so-called "rollup", which can lead them to "consider an entire segment of a site or the site itself as malicious", as explained here: [blogs.bing.com...]

That could be what's happening, because there's no way my FAQ pages (which are listed) are malicious in any way. If all pages listed there in Site Explorer are part of the rollup, as opposed to these containing malware themselves, how are we to find out where they think the malware is?

All of that is assuming this is actually what got us banned, it doesn't have to be. If it is, Bing is indeed buggy.

I reckon this might be a huge bug, as we've run full audits and the few lines of JavaScript in use surely shouldn't be flagged as malware; they're present on other sites that have not been removed.

Filtering for malware there are completely valid and original url, it is very difficult to understand technically.

Do you host any files that could be mistakenly flagged as malware, like executables? Do these site run ads?

It looks like the engine has indexed anything over all these years that has never been updated.

I also see a lot of old stuff in the Site Explorer, as well as pages that never existed, all now resulting in 404s.

Might the problem be a biased human review(er) simply not liking the smell of your content, even if it's valid and of quality?

I'm hopeful that human reviewers don't have that much power with any of the major search engines. I think they're there mostly to verify what the system has already detected, and report back any false flags so that the system can be improved where necessary. But there's definitely a human factor here. After all, one reviewer keeps suggesting the penalty is valid by pointing me to the Webmaster Guidelines, while the other escalated the ticket to the engineering team, suggesting there's a mismatch between the detection and the reviewer's opinion.

Oh, I just had to sign up and share my experiences here.

Long story short: robzilla, don't get your hopes up.

I went though the EXACT same thing you're going through right now, right down to the two disparate emails, and the final conclusion was just 'read the guidelines' and no progress one way or another.

The site explorer also shows nearly every page of my website as being infected with malware, while this isn't the case. It's bizarre, and they've given me no explanation for it. It might very well be a bug, but I don't know.

I found out my site had been deindexed back in October, when I decided to randomly check BWT. At that point, it'd already been out of the index for two months, and I didn't even notice. Few notes about this specific website: It's a side project entertainment site where I share news/features about a specific genre. No link building or unusual SEO. No ads or monetization of any kind. Just something for fun.

I sent an email. No reply for a month. So I sent another, and got a response almost immediately. They eventually said they were escalating the issue to their engineers, which gave me hope. Then I got a response to my first email, saying the site violated their guidelines. Okay. Another month passed, and after a series of pointless "please give us more time" emails, I got the final one reiterating the guidelines issue. No specific information about the problem was ever given, so no progress gained from where I started. Huge waste of time.

In the interim, I did update the site's design and made a few changes, but no luck so far.

As far as I understand, the customer support person you're speaking to will never know more about the situation than you do. Their 'engineers' won't actually give them specific information. They'll only state whether or not a block has been lifted, etc. In my case, they did send two 'reviewers' to my site via playmsn (something like Amazon Turk, I think, pennies for performing tasks), one from India, one from Mexico. I'm not sure what weight that had on the issue.

In the end, I was told to fix the problem (whatever that might be) and wait for the bing crawler to decide the site's okay. So at the very least, I'm guessing, I'm not on a spam list or something manual like that. The comment above by Andem about there "not being enough links" is interesting, because that's the ONLY thing I can think of for this particular site's case, given that it's small and doesn't really have any. But that probably isn't the case since this is happening to more established sites, as well. I've also, over years and years of making websites, never experienced this before.

Something is wrong in Bing land.

Back to the site explorer malware issue, I asked them no less than three times why it showed that (and it still does, two months later), and they never clearly answered the question. Here were their answers:

1. That data is from 6 months ago (okay, but the site didn't have malware 6 months ago, either.)
2. Your site doesn't have malware (thanks for noticing)
3. ...they just ignored me entirely.

I wouldn't care a single bit about Bing if they weren't also powering DDG, Ecosia, etc. Even then, I don't know how much I care. I used to advocate for those alternate search engines, but now....eh.

Hopefully, your issue gets resolved. I've seen others who have been deindexed in the past get back in, but also others who were deindexed a year ago who still face the problem. But as far as I can tell, it just seems like it's out of our hands. I'm tired of this big tech Kafkaesque nonsense of stating there's a problem but never telling you what it is. It's absurd.

Well, good luck!