I was doing a bit of work today on a couple of websites, including this one and noticed a drop in traffic from Bing. Initially I thought this might be related to the website re-design which was rolled out February 6th. However it looks like the problem goes back to November, when traffic suddenly dropped off. De-indexing looks like it started January 16th and was complete 4th of February with now no pages from dasmirnov.net now being in their index. However their webmaster tools don’t suggest any problems with the site.
Annoyingly this looks like it’s also now effecting Gamercast. Although that is still showing as being indexed and looks like it’s just hidden from their results. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that also starts to get de-indexed in the next month or so. That had a substantial overhaul about 10 months ago, but no substantial changes that would have an effect recently.
As Bing powers DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, both sites are now de-listed there too.
Funnily enough I’ve been debating about getting a shorter domain name lately - this might encourage me to do it.
Never thought I’d say this, but thankfully we’ve still got Google. After reading a few horror stories with websites being de-listed from Bing I’m happy I don’t rely on these to make any money. If the website ever shows up in the index again I’ll make sure to update the post.
Update (15th March)
After further research I’ve decided to make a few changes:
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Last year I changed DNS servers and added a wildcard for the subdomain records - this could have resulted in some 20+ year old subdomains making their way into Bing, the server was configured to just re-direct and display the dasmirnov.net homepage. I’ve removed the wildcard and have manually specified the dozen or so important subdomains.
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I’ve also used the disavow link tool to exclude some of my old gaming websites from counting as backlinks, most of these are on subdomains on dasmirnov.net, although two are still on their own domains, they’d often have links in their sidebars. These websites have been online for over seventeen years though - before Bing even existed, so a bit weird if that suddenly affected anything.
I’ve sent a support request through to Microsoft regarding Gamercast - we’ll see what they say.
With dasmirnov.net I’ll give it a few weeks and see if anything changes.
Update (4th June)
Both websites are still not listed in Bing, and as I predicted earlier Gamercast has been de-indexed entirely now.
Sent another ticket in to Microsoft Bing support on the 23rd of May, got a reply back quickly stating:
Good Day! I have reviewed your site, and I have now reached out to our Product Review Group for further analysis.
In the meantime, you can go through our Bing Webmaster guidelines to check if your site is violating any of the rules cited in Bing Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results.
Still nothing else, yet.
Update (10th July)
No further reply from Bing support, however I’ve noticed Gamercast has been getting traffic from DuckDuckGo and Bing this weekend, checking the Webmaster Tools shows its being re-indexed. No further news on dasmirnov.net.
Update (30th October 2022)
Looks like dasmirnov.net is back in Bing results.
Update (22nd December 2022)
Looks like both gamercast.net and dasmirnov.net have been removed from the results, again.