I do too. However, I am responsible for a couple of sites that Bing absolutely refuses to even index. Google has no issues with them, not for 10 years running. Those sites are effectively invisible in Bing and therefore DuckDuckGo. I’m not talking about low ranking, the entire domain is ignored.
My own personal website for example is not even listed in the search engine I use. Microsoft support see the issue but have no explanation and escalate and quote “quality requirements” for weeks now. A human review yielded positive results regarding quality. Meanwhile, I see lots of SEO spam on DDG when searching for generic technical terms.
Sure. A very simple one would be https://ipbl.herrbischoff.com, a public blocklist page referencing a resource used by a couple dozen users. The HTML doesn't get a lot simpler than that and is entirely valid markup. It's (unsurprisingly) low ranked in Google but it's there.
Not so in Bing, it's simply not there. The page exists since March 2021. Bing Webmaster Tools reads "Discovered but not crawled. URL cannot appear on Bing", giving no further reason. Also: "Last crawl attempted 01 Feb 2022 at 19:35", which means that Bing did not bother to retry for months, despite me submitting it manually on a regular basis. Clicking the "Live URL" tab results in entirely green checkmarks along with "URL can be indexed by Bing".
Another example would be my personal site: https://herrbischoff.com. Same issue. That one is listed on Google for more than 10 years.
This is fascinating, thanks. Have you experimented on allowing the bing ad bot that you have blocked? If they have some kind of retaliatory non-crawling?
Interesting theory. But the IPBL doesn’t even have a robots.txt and a different, larger site from a German celebrity I host does have the same directives and is indexed, although incompletely.
My working theory is that Bing’s selection algorithm is biased towards large and already popular sites. In the server logs, I don’t see Bing even attempting to crawl the sites I mentioned, except requesting robots.txt and the root page. Bing appears to be excruciatingly slow to update anything but high traffic sites.
Again, Microsoft Support was unable to explain this behavior even after manual, human review found everything to be in order.
I tried deleting robots.txt entirely and got only Chinese crawlers and SEO bots, but still no Bing crawl. All organic traffic comes from blogs linking directly and Google.
Bing constantly prioritizes the content to be indexed that will drive highest users satisfaction. Please follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to better understand criteria for most valuable content.
My own personal website for example is not even listed in the search engine I use. Microsoft support see the issue but have no explanation and escalate and quote “quality requirements” for weeks now. A human review yielded positive results regarding quality. Meanwhile, I see lots of SEO spam on DDG when searching for generic technical terms.