Bing Webmaster Tools for Adult Sites: 404 Floods, Old URLs and a Site Bing Won’t Index

Bing gets less attention than Google from adult webmasters, but it powers more than bing.com: DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and Microsoft’s AI answers all draw on its index. For adult sites that Google filters heavily, Bing is often the second or third largest search source. This post covers what we found when we looked at Bing properly across our network, including two mistakes worth avoiding.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools first

1. Add the site at bing.com/webmasters. If you already use Google Search Console, you can import your verified sites in one step.
2. Submit the sitemap index.
3. Create an API key (Settings → API access). It lets you submit URLs and read statistics from your own scripts.
4. Set up IndexNow as well; Bing processes it quickly. See our IndexNow guide.

Mistake 1: reading one day of logs

Bing’s dashboard showed far more crawling than our server’s access log for the day seemed to contain, and we briefly concluded most of Bing’s crawl wasn’t reaching our server. Wrong: we had read only the current log file. The rotated logs from the previous days held 2,255 Bingbot requests for that site. Bing crawls in bursts, not evenly. Always read several days of logs (including rotated and compressed ones) before drawing conclusions about any crawler.

Mistake 2: forgetting old URLs after a move

Those 2,255 requests hid the real problem: 669 of them were 404s on 655 different video URLs. Those videos had moved from one of our sites to a sister site months earlier. Bing still had the old URLs and kept re-checking them, wasting crawl budget and seeing a site full of errors.

The fix was a lookup at the 404 stage:

• If an old video slug is known and the video is live on the new site: 301 redirect to its new URL. Bing transfers the old URL’s standing and updates its index.
• If the slug is known but the video is gone: 410 Gone, which tells crawlers to drop it for good, faster than a 404.
• If the slug is unknown: a normal 404.

The map is rebuilt daily from the new site’s database, so it follows every new move. One detail: keep 410 only for URLs you know existed. Our first version answered 410 for any unknown video URL, and our own site checks (which expect a 404 for a made-up URL) caught it the same day.

Daily URL submission

Bing’s URL submission API accepts a daily quota of URLs per site. We submit new and updated hub pages (tags, performers, categories) every day, newest first. Combined with IndexNow, new pages are usually crawled within a day or two.

The site Bing won’t index

One of our sites has zero pages in Bing’s index, while its sister sites on the same server, with the same software and similar content, are indexed. It is crawled; nothing is kept. Everything technical checks out: robots.txt allows Bingbot, pages return 200, the sitemap is valid. That pattern points to a domain-level filter, something about the domain’s history or how it was classified, rather than a page problem.

What to do in that situation:

• Rule out the technical causes first (robots, noindex headers, firewall challenges for Bingbot, canonical tags pointing elsewhere).
• Check the domain’s history (archive.org, old backlinks). A domain previously used for spam carries that.
• Use Bing Webmaster Tools’ support form to ask for a review. Explain what the site is.
• Don’t wait for it: grow through the other engines and channels in the meantime.

Indexed but invisible

For most of our sites, Bing’s index grew steadily, yet clicks from Bing stayed low. Being indexed isn’t ranking. Bing seems to weigh links and the site’s age heavily for adult queries; new sites with few links get indexed and then wait. That’s another reason to work on honest link exchanges early.

Checklist

1. Bing Webmaster Tools + API key + IndexNow.
2. Read several days of logs for Bingbot, rotated files included.
3. Look for 404s on URLs you used to have; 301 what moved, 410 what’s gone.
4. Submit new hub pages daily.
5. If a whole domain stays at zero pages with no technical cause, ask Bing for a review and grow elsewhere.

Other engines: Yandex for adult sites and the search engines directory.