Microsoft's Search Bot MSNBot 2 Adding Pound Signs to URLs?

Jul 20, 2009 - 8:54 am 1 by
Filed Under Bing Search

A Bing thread has two complaints from webmasters on Microsoft's newish crawler, MSNBot 2. The bot, in some cases, might be adding a pound sign (#) to the end of the URLs.

Now, this might not be the fault of Microsoft, it might be an issue with links and/or the web site's being crawled. But there are now two people reporting it and MSNBot 2 is a beta bot that may have issues, as Microsoft did allude to.

On June 29th, Brett from the Microsoft team did say, "I'm getting our crawler team to look at this. I'll update you as soon as I've heard back." But since then, we have not heard back.

Of course, there are ways to force the bot to the correct URL. I.e. block the # signs in your robots.txt or 301 redirect those URLs to the main URL.

Forum discussion at Bing Help.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Google Search Volatility

More Details

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Updates

Google Search Ranking Volatility This Weekend - Around June 6th

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:55 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Document On Third-Party SEO Tools, Services & Advice

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Updates Its Hiring An SEO Doc Warning On SEO Tools & AI Optimization

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Search Profiles Insights & Analytics

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Bing Gives Searchers A Way To Disable AI Copilot Answers

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:21 am
Google

Google: Google Chrome Won't Set AI Mode The Default Search Experience

Jun 8, 2026 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: YouTube Testing 3D Videos (YT3D)