Recover Website Removed By Bing

Introduction

About four months ago, someone told me that this website, which used to be listed in Bing search results, was completely removed from Bing. I confirmed it by checking the statistics of the website access in the Bing Webmaster Tools and searching using different keywords related to some of the popular articles on the website in Bing.

In this blog post, I would like to share my experience of recovering the website that was removed from Bing search results.

Recover Website Removed By Bing

The Bing Webmaster Tools did not indicate this website was removed from Bing, despite the website impression became zero. In the recommendations section in the Bing Webmaster Tools, it said that “Missing or undiscovered sitemap.” but I already specified the sitemap in the Bing Webmaster Tools and it was still accessible. I was very confused and did not know what I could do, so I submitted a support ticket to the Bing Webmaster Support Team. I did not get any response from Bing Webmaster Support Team for a long time, so I was very disappointed and forgot about it.

Yesterday, four months after I submitted the support ticket to the Bing Webmaster Support Team, I received an Email from the Bing Webmaster Support Team saying that they have resolved the issue related to my website. I checked the Bing Webmaster Tools and found that the website impression has been restored to normal and I could find this website in Bing search results again.

I have attached the Email I received from the Bing Webmaster Support Team below for future reference.

Thank you for your patience!

I am happy to inform you that the issue related to your site https://leimao.github.io/ has been resolved.

If your site is not crawled or indexed, it may take up to 2-3 weeks for your site to serve again. Additionally, you can submit your URL using IndexNow feature to get them recrawled faster.

Please review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, to avoid this in the future.

We hope the resolution provided has been able to fully address your issue. We will be closing this ticket. However, if you do have any follow up questions or concerns, please submit a feedback here.

Take care and stay safe!

Sincerely,
Bing Webmaster Support Team

The reply from the Bing Webmaster Support Team in the Email, however, was very generic and did not tell me why this website was removed from Bing search results in the first place. They also suggested that this website might be removed from Bing search results again in the future if I do not follow the Bing Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid. I was still very confused after checking the Bing Webmaster Guidelines because I found this website is compliant with almost all the guidelines they created.

Conclusions

Many search engine and content sharing services, such as Google, Bing, and WeChat, manages their resources and services in a way that is not transparent to the users, and their algorithms are not “smart”. This is not the first time I encountered such issues. WeChat China have listed this website as a “pornography” website since two or three years ago I think, which prevented all the WeChat China users from accessing this website via WeChat. The WeChat US users, however, do not seem to be affected by this issue. I have completely no idea how and why WeChat China could classify this website as a “pornography” website and their customer support team would not even respond to your support request. This also reminded me of the time when my YouTube channel got removed and it was completely due to their fault.