a response to bing’s url removal policy
i like duane forrester. i believe he is helping bring interest back to bing as a legitimate search engine to optimize for. granted most sites receive the majority of search traffic from google, bing does represent a portion that is hard to ignore. this is even more important when the tools to improve visibility are given to you.
unfortunately, i had a less-than-positive experience recently when i tried using their url removal tool. i plugged in a url that represented an entire directory of content to be removed and, in response to me submitting the request, bing denied it. the message stated “bing indicates the url as having content important to search traffic”. their solution was to use a meta robots noindex tag instead.
@cometton no, and the suggested solution is…er…suggested… 
— duane forrester (@duaneforrester) august 15, 2013
the difficulty in relying on the noindex tag requires bing’s crawler to re-visit each page. the time it could take to re-crawl every page could take months depending on the level of influence i exert on the crawler.
in addition, for some clients i have worked for, development work is not always a quick process nor options in other cases even for simple changes like meta tags.
lastly, and the focus of my tweet to duane after i had first received the message, the decision to remove content was taken away from me and instead given to a tool.
what makes bing sure these sets of pages are important to me?
i understand not everyone using a tool like this may understand the consequences of their decisions, similar to what we see with the aftermath of penguin. in fact, google has the same tool in their platform but does not block any requests for removal. if you think about it, it is significantly more detrimental to search traffic if some of your pages were removed from google compared to bing.
so, what’s my solution? having the option to override the warning by bing. the message is broadcasted that this may potentially harm your site but the user is given a choice. it’s as simple as that.
their have been times when content was directed to be removed as quickly as possible and simply waiting for a re-crawl of content with a noindex tag was not acceptable. the url removal tools are a great step in the right direction in empowering users but more can be done by bing to greatly improve our capabilities in such a fast-paced environment.
duane, if you’re reading this then thank you and welcome to my site! i don’t know much about you but you rock as an evangelizer of seo. if there is a chance you can provide feedback to my solution, i would love to hear it in the comments below!