Site will not index / appear on Bing

Bing will not index our Squarespace site (google indexes without issue).

Bing diagnostic tools do not identify the problem. I also have asked Bing support to advise what the problem is but they only email an ambiguous scripted reply. It seems they will not answer specific questions or provide any assistance.

Has anyone else had this issue please, or know how to identify and remedy such a fundamental and disastrous error?

Just to add our health score on ahrefs is 99 (1 error = Non-canonical page in sitemap) - we understand this should not stop indexing, or are we wrong?

I've also experienced the same issue. I've submitted my site map and my Url's but my website still won't appear in bing searches. I contacted squarespace but they said the issue was with bing and they would have to fix it. 

Fortunately my instagram account and trustpilot review pages appear on bing so people can find my website but it's incredibly annoying. Google indexed my site in a few days and bing won't after 5 months. 

Thanks for your reply. This is absolutely nuts, Bing is rejecting healthy sites and not providing any explanation whatsoever. Seemingly it's a relatively widespread issue but I can't find any workarounds ..

I just discovered, and reported to Squarespace support, that Bing is most likely not indexing most Squarespace pages due to invalid HTML in <img> tags - where the user has taken the time to populate the alt tags in their images.

Squarespace includes two alt tags: one empty, and one populated. Bing doesn't like it, my research appears to show. Google ignores the issue; Bing does not.

I have asked for a high priority fix as this probably affects a large number of Squarespace users. You can only see the offending tags when you right-click -> view page source in the browser; it does not show in the developer consoles because the DOM is already fixed after page loading.

During the initial crawl by Bing and Google, they analyze the raw HTML page. Microsoft is generally more pedantic on standards, so my hypothesis is that Bing sees the invalid HTML and tags the error incorrectly. It appears as an empty alt tag warning, when actually there are two tags in the same element and this is invalid HTML.

Because of this, 100% of my product pages are not indexed by Bing. 

I encourage you to contact support if you're still having problems with your site.

I just wanted to let you guys know that I did some more troubleshooting and I'm still having the same issues with Bing not indexing my site. I reached out to squarespace support and had to argue a little until the agent took my issue seriously, escalated the issue, and passed it onto a product support specialist.

The specialist preformed a test and is running into the same issues we are all experiencing trying to get our sites indexed on Bing. They are currently trying to find a work around. I'm hopeful that this will get resolved for all of us soon as they are now aware of the issue and are working on a solution. I will keep this thread updated once I hear more from the specialist. 

I am having the same issue, and this is very important for AI work. Please keep us updated on progress:

On 2/1/2024 at 4:52 PM, Designrock said:

Bing will not index our Squarespace site (google indexes without issue).

Bing diagnostic tools do not identify the problem. I also have asked Bing support to advise what the problem is but they only email an ambiguous scripted reply. It seems they will not answer specific questions or provide any assistance.

Has anyone else had this issue please, or know how to identify and remedy such a fundamental and disastrous error?

Just to add our site health score on ahrefs is 99 (1 error = Non-canonical page in sitemap) - we understand this should not stop indexing, or are we wrong?

 

There is problem with the Bing search engine, we have experience this indexing issues many time and yet not able to come up with the solution. Even we also sent them Email, but the issues was never suppose to resolved. Now we are only rely on Google. 

I just wanted to add that I ran into the exact same problem and have not been able to resolve it on my own, same as others in this thread. If this is indeed a problem that is systematically affecting Squarespace-hosted websites, then I certainly hope that Squarespace addresses this on behalf of its users promptly.

One last comment just to make sure this gets the right priority. I know that Google has a large dominance when it comes to search and that the people using Bing are a minority. However, Microsoft and Open AI do have a strong position when it comes to AI, and rely on Bing indexing to gather info from the web. We are completely blocked on our number one AI initiative because of this issue and may have to move away from Squarespace because of it. I really hope this gets a high priority fix soon so we don’t have to. Thank you.

@VicenteBustamante It looks like you moved the domain to another platform at the moment. You likely just needed to give Bing time to process the site. The other examples sites listed above are now indexed on Bing. Note that all the pages Google had indexed on your site are now a 404.

49 minutes ago, Collaborada said:

@VicenteBustamante It looks like you've move the domain to another platform at the moment. You likely just needed to give Bing time to process the site. The examples sites listed above are indexed. Note that all the pages Google had indexed are now a 404.

Thank you for your response, yes we made the decision to move the site to another provider based on support’s response to our ticket. As you can see from the screen shot in earlier posts this was not an issue of allowing more time, Bing had already discovered the site and deliberately decided not to index it, same issue others have reported on this post.  

4 hours ago, VicenteBustamante said:

Thank you for your response, yes we made the decision to move the site to another provider based on support’s response to our ticket. As you can see from the screen shot in earlier posts this was not an issue of allowing more time, Bing had already discovered the site and deliberately decided not to index it, same issue others have reported on this post.  

Right, that is the problem with the Bing for along time.