Comment by veyh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veyh | Hacker News Reader

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Some time ago I noticed that my side project (with a domain that is not haunted) shows up fine on Google but not Bing/DuckDuckGo.

So I checked the Bing Webmaster Tools. URL Inspection says "Discovered but not crawled - The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation."

That's quite unhelpful. What's more, when I open the "Live URL" tab, it says, in green: "URL can be indexed by Bing."

It's a simple static Hugo site hosted on Cloudflare R2 (DNS mapped directly to bucket). https://pagespeed.web.dev gives it a score of 100 in every category.

Anyone else had something like this happen?

Yup. I've regularly had problems with a static site [0]. Sometimes it's a top hit for my name on Bing, sometimes completely unlisted. Seems to flip back and forth - with that same message you get.

It's a handwritten HTML website, enhanced with JS but not reliant on it, hosted on Cloudflare. Not quite a 100 in every PageSpeed category, but just about.

[0] https://jamesmilne.org/

OP here, and yes, I've been getting that same message for musicbox.fun. I thought it just needed some time but I requested a fresh index two weeks ago, and nothing seems to have changed. :/

A side effect of negative seo is that some stuff that hasn't worked on Google for a long time still does on Bing (They, Bing, obviously, not being the real target of the attack).

I've seen a few sites become de-indexed and the 'give away' is the type of results that first appear when the penalty is eventually lifted. For example, just a dozen or so urls with really weird query strings that never existed before. The real stuff does come back after time though and, in my limited experience, it's a one-off incident.

Just to add, not many sites are insignificant enough not to attract negative seo - especially this type of low-level, zero cost malarkey.

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