Seems like Bing is not honoring the No-follow and No-Index meta tags. The tags are used to tell the search engine bot that it should not follow the link and index it. In a post on the Bing forum, one user has complained about the same. The post from the Webmaster and the reply from Microsoft are mentioned below for your information. (Via)
jiosis (Webmaster)
I have a site containing pages that I don’t want their content being indexed by search engines so all of those pages have
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />
in their header and it has been like this for a while now.
Both Google and Yahoo respected the tag and those pages are not being indexed by them but today I checked and found all those pages even recent ones are indexed and cached on Bing.
Any idea?Brett Yount (Program Manager | Bing Webmaster Center)
Hi,
This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:
http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*
Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.
So if you too are finding the links no follow and no-index links ( which shouldnt be indexed or crawled by MSNBOTS) getting indexed, do as the Program Manager above says. I will suggest that you also add that link’s entry in robots.txt file ( which most of the crawlers honor)
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About Vaibhav Pandey
At the very core of my heart, i am someone who enjoys creating things. A computer engineer by education i grew up in New Delhi in India. My interests include network security, mobility and cloud computing.
Follow me on Twitter at @vaibhav1981 Tagged with: Bing, Domain Name, Google, Leg Work, Lt, Mail, Meta Content, Meta Name, Meta Tags, Microsoft, Msnbots, Noindex and nofollow links getting indexed, Removal Request, Reply, Robots, search engine, Search Engines, Subject Line, Urls, Webmaster Center, Wildcard, Yount