Bing is not indexing my site (Reply from Bing)

If the IP were blocked it was because the access was abusive, this has happened many times with Bing and there is nothing we can do to prevent Bing from being abusive to the server.

If Bing wants to present their IP, I will have a look at what happened but I an not wasting my time trying to figure out which IP Bing bot is using this week.

Yeah but as a fallout of you not wanting to waste your time, many of the freetoasthost-powered websites aren't discoverable on Bing. In fact, among all the FTH sites that I've tried out, I've not seen a single one appearing in their results, except this one.

So I guess the short answer is no, it doesn't and won't show up on Bing ever. Thanks anyway.

No as a result of Bing not having a well behaved spider. The Bing spider kills the performance of the FTH server. The Bing does follow the industry standards of following the instructions set in the robots.txt. when they fix their spider we will let the back in.

We have no issues with the Google and Yahoo spiders just Bing.

I think we may want to try using a crawl delay directive so that at least we can show up on Bing:

blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2012/05/03/to-c...is-bingbots-question
www.siteground.com/kb/how_to_decrease_th...s_search_engine_bot/

I am committed to good server performance, also.

However, even though I think I understand the performance concerns, not showing up on Bing seems a bit problematic, since there really is no way that we can conceivably tell a complete stranger who is just looking for a Toastmasters meeting to attend that they must not use Bing to find an appropriate club's website. They are going to use what ever search engine they desire to use, and if their preferred search engine is Bing, then we are essentially impeding their ability to find and look at the website of a prospective club that they may want to visit and/or join.

Therefore, I think that trying to degrade Bing's rate of crawling FTH websites via a directive is probably worth investigating, since it would at least allow FTH websites to show up on Bing, albeit even if they are a bit outdated due to setting a high crawl delay.

We need to seek an acceptable compromise, an acceptable "middle ground" that does not kill the server while supporting all the various popular search engines of the current moment.

Brian wrote: No as a result of Bing not having a well behaved spider. The Bing spider kills the performance of the FTH server. The Bing does follow the industry standards of following the instructions set in the robots.txt. when they fix their spider we will let the back in.

We have no issues with the Google and Yahoo spiders just Bing.

I wrote this reply to Brian's message before Steve posted.

I really don't think we should expect Bing to change their behavior. They index billions of other pages without an issue, so if anything needs to change, I think it's something on the FreeToastHost end. That could be the robots.txt, the rules you use to ban IPs or perhaps something else.

You're really doing a disservice to Toastmasters if you're letting thousands of club sites not be indexed by the second largest search engine in the world. It's a significant issue that you should spend some time looking into rather than brushing it off. I know you site admins do this for free, and we appreciate it, but you should seriously consider open sourcing the FTH project if you can't be bothered to seriously look into getting this issue resolved.