Since Bing de-indexed our site, I've been looking closer at engagement rates for articles in GA4. It's really obvious that Microsoft has some black ops team (or contracts one) that goes after critical content. Anything I write about Microsoft that isn't favorable has about 50 page views per month with 0 seconds on the page.
In other words, they're trying to sink the page by contriving non-engagement. If you look at the pages with 0 seconds of engagement (we usually get 1:30 to 2 mins per page), they're all pages that Microsoft would love to flush down the toilet. Once again, they thought we wouldn't see this, but we did!
At this point, I'm filing complaints with the SEC and other federal authorities. Although Bing is not a monopoly, Microsoft leverages what little power they have so poorly. They've always been such a crooked company.
Another thing -- Microsoft continued to HAMMER our site with Bing bots, even after we were de-indexed. I went into their webmaster tools, turned off all bots, deleted the sitemap, etc. They were STILL hitting our site like crazy. It's like a DDOS attack. 3000+ hits a day from their bots, but we're not even indexed. It's probably ChatGPT stealing our content, which I have also noticed. (Yet another issue to take up with the feds.)
The bot requests do detract from web performance. I see a clear correlation between Microsoft's bot activity and decreased traffic on my site. We haven't been indexed on Bing for over a year, but their last Bing Bot attack (that's what it is) took place a few days ago. I recently configured WordFence to completely block Microsoft, as they appear to sneak around robots.txt with some unknown, anonymous crawler.
I changed our robots.txt to block all Microsoft crawlers, then configured WordFence to block everything but Google. I used rate limiting, so anyone clicking and bailing will be blocked. Sometimes they use click farms in developing nations, but they too will be blocked.
This is no fluke. This is no mistake. Our website has earned over 20 million page views, and our writers have worked in tech for decades. Microsoft wants a world where only corporate media conglomerates can report the news, so their PR sluts can woo them into writing favorable articles.
If you've ever worked at a big tech company and know who does PR, you'll know how the world works. Microsoft will treat Bloomberg, WSJ, Verge, etc. writers as geniuses, but most are English or History majors with friends who work in the media.
Microsoft can manage the corporate media's reviews. If one of these companies happens to be honest about how bad Microsoft products are, their PR hootchie mammas will be out there with short skirts pleading with some nerd to change it. For the most part, when a new Microsoft product is launched, the corporate media is fed talking points.
Talking points, talking points, and more talking points. Aren't we fed up with these yet? I am fed up with corporations regurgitating talking points into another corporation's mouth.
They can't do that with our site. They can't do it with any independent site. So they de-index us and many others.
They have a legal right to de-index us but not to sabotage our website. We are well aware of their dirty tricks, and we're sharing them with the feds. Even if you're on Bing, the best thing you can do is block Microsoft in every way possible. Block any crawler other than Google. WordFence is excellent for this!
