cannot get website to appear on bing

[cerberus]

Hi,

Can anybody help to explain and help me fix why I cannot get my url indexed on bing ?

My site is installed into a folder, so I have a redirect in the htaccess for the url to go to the folder.

This is the redirect in the htaccess :
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
Redirect 301 /index.html https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php
</IfModule>


Trying to get my url indexed on bing this is what I get, bing will not accept :
https://XXXX.com
(bing says Not indexed as this page is a redirect
URL cannot appear on Bing)


So I tried :
https://XXXX.com/shop
Again bing will not accept that, bing says "Discovered but not crawled
URL cannot appear on Bing"
(it also says "Discovered on 01 Jan 2006" ???)


And I tried :
https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php
Bing says the url is known to bing but it cannot be indexed as it has issues which are preventing indexation

It refers me to bing guidelines to fix, but that does not help, as I have not adjusted the index in any way, and the bing guidelines page is just a general page that explains nothing (that I can understand why).

I have also tried the bing "indexnow", but got nowhere, just a blank white page with no indication of what is happening (the bing txt file I uploaded is accessible, I have tried putting it in the root and the folder the site is installed in)

Google is not a problem, the urls are appearing on google, I used bings import to import from google webmaster tools to bing webmaster tools.

I have a robots.txt and burts xml sitemaps addon installed to see if that will help, it does not with bing.

So it seems bing will not index my url, any ideas on how to fix, has anyone else had issues like this and found a way around ?

Thank you,
steve

[cbs]

I'm no expert on Apache but this doesnt look correct

Code: Select all

Redirect 301 /index.html https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php

Did a little google and the examples it gives for a subfolder redirect is

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule (.*) /mysubfolder/ [R=301,L]

From experience changing something like this might affect your Google ranking

[cerberus]

Hi cbs,

I am a complete beginner, so I am not surprised it is not correct (I have more mistakes than successes )

I just tried to look that up and got confused, none of it made any sense to me (I am not surprised)

So I just changed the redirect in the htaccess file to :

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule (.*) /shop/ [R=301,L]

I presume that is correct ? (the only bit I understand is the "301" bit )

It does seem to work/redirect, so I presume leave it like that and see what happens with bing indexing (and google) ?

Thank you,
Steve

[14Steve14]

I may be thinking of something else, but where have you put the BingSiteAuth.xml file?

If you have not got one of those, how have you verified the url of the website?

[cerberus]

Apparently I dont need the BingSiteAuth.xml as I imported the site from the google webmaster tools. I imported https://XXXX.com and https://XXXX.com/shop

(see both images below)

Screenshot 2026-10-30 181011.png

Screenshot 2026-10-30 180948.png

[cerberus]

no one has any ideas how to get indexed on bing then ?

[cbs]

There could be a lot of reasons why you aren't being indexed. The first was because of redirects. Check that the changes made fixed that issue and then look for the next one. SEO issues are difficult and if you do too much at once it can have a negative effect. On Monday I'll have a look to see on Bing webmaster if there is anyway to force an inspection.

[burt]

I do have an Bing IndexNow mod, coded and tested.
It's in the Queue to be released into the Co-op, I'll bump it up the list.

Whether that will help, I do not know.

[burt]

This

https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php
Bing says the url is known to bing but it cannot be indexed as it has issues which are preventing indexation

Might be causing this:

So I tried :
https://XXXX.com/shop
Again bing will not accept that, bing says "Discovered but not crawled
URL cannot appear on Bing"

You next step is to go to Bing and find out the exact issues which are preventing indexation.

[14Steve14]

I am no expert but I just put a bried description of your problem and your original redirect into chatgpt and it says that it is wrong in many ways which wont help. Bing hates redirects whilst google will tolerate them.

It suggests trying the following if the redirect is in the root folder.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Safely redirect root index.html to the shop index.php
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

and if its in the shop folder use

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /shop/

# Safely redirect index.html inside the shop folder to index.php
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

You may already have RewriteEngine On elsewhere in your htaccess file but with either of these bits at the top of the file it should not really matter.

Clear the server cache and go back to the Bing Webmaster Tools URL Inspection tool and test https://XXXX.com/shop/index.php

If you really want to try something put your full htaccess file into chatgpt with a description of the problem you are having and let it give you some advice on what to change and what it should be looking like. htaccess files can be a nighmare.

If that does not work you will have to start working through the help guide and try a few things remembering to keep clearing the server cache as you go. You may need your hosts help to do that if you cant from within your hosting.