Jarno van Driel said he reached out to Bing via Bing Webmaster Tools support contact form and it turned out that Bing was blocking some of his "money pages" for some reason. He did nothing technically wrong and Bing fixed it on their end and now the pages are ranking again.
Here is the tweet where he said this:
I just got confirmation it was an algo fluke and that the block has been removed (and the site is starting to recover.)
— Jarno van Driel (@JarnoVanDriel) March 3, 2020
So lesson learned, if something happens in Bing that you really can't explain, make sure to file a support request.
Thanks for the fast action @CoperniX pic.twitter.com/F7NtaxW1kd
I asked him to confirm that there was nothing he did wrong or nothing he had to change to make a difference:
100% a fluke on their end. After manual inspection they removed the block while nothing changed to the site in the meantime
— Jarno van Driel (@JarnoVanDriel) March 3, 2020
I asked if there's anything that should've been done differently though they couldn't get into that and gave a list of 2014 articles by @DuaneForrester
No, a subset of pages was being blocked from the search result by Bing.
— Jarno van Driel (@JarnoVanDriel) March 3, 2020
The site wasn't blocking anything nor were there any server/onsite issues.
He said it was a 100% on the Bing side. But he did add, that it is his fault for not being too engaged with Bing Webmaster Tools. If he would have spotted this earlier through Bing Webmaster Tools, he would have noticed this earlier and asked Bing sooner to fix it.
I don't want to give the impression I think this went completely bad though. Obviously this should have been handled better by @BingWMC tool but on the other side, the responsiveness has been great. Something's that's certainly been different in the past.
— Jarno van Driel (@JarnoVanDriel) March 3, 2020
So this gives everyone even more of a reason to check out Bing Webmaster Tools and check on the health of their sites in Bing. In fact, the Bing support form is supposedly very responsive and Bing employees do read them and response in a timely fashion.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
