I found my site delisted by Bing after many years of being the top result for my search terms. I noticed Bing’s index of my site content contained hundreds of junk URLs that do not exist, and never have.
So what’s happening is a bad actor is running exploit scans on the domain looking for compromised directories, eg
- /admin
- /blogs
- /store
- /backup
- /wp2
- /cms
- /kcfinder
- /dev
- /demo
None of those exist so they cause a cache miss at Cloudflare, and Crawler Hints then submits this to Bing via IndexNow. I understand the intent behind Crawler Hints but this behaviour is extremely undesirable. This image shows junk URLs added by Crawler Hints to Bing’s index.
