Twitter (X) Now Is Blocking Bing Search

Oct 19, 2023 - 7:51 am 14 by
Filed Under Bing Search

Twitter Bird Fighting Bing Robots

X, well, Twitter.com, is now blocking Bing Search, specifically Bingbot, from crawling and accessing content posted on Twitter.com, on the X platform. Twitter specifically added to its robots.txt file a directive to disallow Bingbot from crawling the content on its platform.

Here is a screenshot of its robots.txt file:

Twitter Robots Txt Bingbot

This was spotted first, I believe, by Mike Ginley who posted this on X, "Twitter blocking Bing is an interesting move..." Glenn Gabe dug into the timeline, noticing this was a fairly recent change by Bing:

In fact, a site command on Bing only shows 180,000 Twitter URLs showing up:

Bing Twitter Site Command

But with Google, a site command shows 422 million URLs.

Google Twitter Site Command

Back in July Twitter blocked Google leading to a huge drop in visibility for Twitter in Google Search. A few days later, Twitter reversed that change.

I guess Twitter / X does not want traffic from Bing Search? I mean, if they want more efficient indexing, just use IndexNow?

Forum discussion at X.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 7, 2025

Feb 7, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Volatility, Google Ads Quality Update, Google AI Overviews Updates & Other Search Engines

Feb 7, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Says People Know When Author Bios Are For SEO Purposes

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Keyword Planner New Auto-Organize Keywords To Ad Groups

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Maps

Google Business Profiles Reinstatements Now Include Case & 5 Upload Documents

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Maps

Google Local Reviews Decreasing Over Past 24 Hours

Feb 7, 2025 - 7:25 am
Previous Story: Google Places 'Shop All Deals' Banner In The Search Results