I recently wrote that we were re-indexed by Bing after being invisible to Bing searchers for the better part of eight months. However, I exercised caution because Bing had not formally advised me of our re-indexing (I have had a Bing case manager since June 19). While this did not stop me from making some tweaks to facilitate our return to Bing, I was not entirely sure that our return would stick. However, I received good news from Bing Webmaster Support in an email on the morning of August 29, 2023, informing me that our issues had been resolved and we were restored to good standing with Bing.
You may be wondering whether I ever learned why Bing banned us in mid-January 2023. Unfortunately, I have no answer. While I worked on resolving minor issues with the site (as always), I did not make any single change that would explain why Bing suddenly re-indexed us after investigation. Under the hood, things are similar now to what they were when Bing purged all New Leaf Journal links from its index in March (we were blocked from appearing in search results in January but not de-indexed until March). What about our site caused a problem for Bing while causing no problems for Google, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, or several other search engines with their own indexes and crawlers? I know not. I doubt Bing will tell me, but I requested additional information anyway.
Our return to Bing (so long as it sticks…) is great news for The New Leaf Journal. Regardless of one’s opinion of Bing (I have some issues), many internet searchers use Bing for one reason or another. Moreover, I explained in prior posts that our second biggest search referrer behind Google was traditionally DuckDuckGo, which relies almost wholly on Bing. DuckDuckGo quickly returned to its second-place status after Bing restored us to its index, although we are not yet receiving the same number of referrals from DuckDuckGo as we were in late 2022 and the first half of January 2023.