Conquering Bing
Or maybe the title should be Relentlessly Badgering Bing Until They Give Up and Finally Fix Things.
The Back Story
On February 3, 2015, I purchased the mattlangford.com from GoDaddy. From the date I purchased it, until October 31, 2025, my site has not been listed on Bing despite taking every measure possible. Over the years, I sent countless emails and support requests, registered for every version of their webmaster's portal, followed every guideline, submitted every sitemap, used IndexNow, consulted dozens of people, the list goes on and on...
No matter what I did, one of two things would happen.
- Nothing
- I'd receive an automated email about Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Naturally, I jumped into the guidelines. What was I missing? What was I doing wrong? I have many websites for various projects, all listed on Bing except for my personal site. I've designed popular themes for blogging platforms used on hundreds, possibly thousands, of sites with no problems. There had to be something more happening.
The End Result (Hopefully)
After one more round of checking everything, verifying once again that I was following all guidelines, submitting everything Bing required, and contacting support once more...I finally saw movement. While I'll never know for sure what caused the change, there is only one thing I did different than the previous times.
In the latest correspondence, I suggested that perhaps issues stemmed from the previous domain owner's site. I have no knowledge if that is the case or not, but I finally received a positive response:
In less than 4 days, my domain was showing prominently in search results.
More Information
The timing also coincided with my blog platform switch. I have no reason to believe that is connected. There are many sites on Micro.blog (my old platform) that use the same themes/styles/formats I used (I created them after all) that are listed without issue.
Oh, one more thing. When Microsoft's search product changed its name to Bing, there was a very small niche web design company owned by me and 2 others. It was registered as Bing Web Design. We never fought it, but I feel that's an intriguing side note to the drama.
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