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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.



Just received a final non-answer from Microsoft support after weeks of escalating:

—————

Thank you for your patience!

After further review, it appears that your site < http://herrbischoff.com https://ipbl.herrbischoff.com/> did not meet the standards set by Bing the last time it was crawled.

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.




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