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Verified Bingbot IPs are spamming my site

Anonymous
2025-01-16T00:02:19+00:00

I have in the last few days seen bad traffic from 124 IP addresses that are in Microsoft's whitelist of Bingbot IPs.

I verified that all 124 IPs are in the bingbot.json file provided by Microsoft:

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

A small handful of these 124 IPs include:

20.15.133.174 (in listed range 20.15.133.160/27)

20.15.133.184 (in listed range 20.15.133.160/27)

40.77.167.0 (in listed range 40.77.167.0/24)

40.77.167.14 (in listed range 40.77.167.0/24)

52.167.144.136 (in listed range 52.167.144.0/24)

52.167.144.239 (in listed range 52.167.144.0/24)

The user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36

The requests include a "search" parameter whose values have nothing to do with my recipe website. Here are some actual examples of the "search" parameter values provided by these requests:

alabama average temperature by month

wells fargo zelle

adidas rose femme

reclining wingback hair

corazon vector

fire in highland ca containment

Note that my website performs all these searches and returns a response.

Note that the six IPs above (and probably all 124) appear on bot blacklists, as checked here https://mx****/blacklists.aspx  I'm clearly not the only person with this issue.

I could just block any IP from a Bingbot user agent that includes a "search" parameter. However, I feel that this is a greater issue. These are IPs that Microsoft have verified as being OK Bingbots and they are obviously doing some weird s**t. I'd also hate to start blocking Bingbot IPs in a way that might affect my actual Bing search traffic.

Bing | Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing | Bing Webmaster Tools

A Microsoft service that provides website owners with tools to monitor, analyze, and optimize their site's performance in Bing search results.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-02-02T13:34:59+00:00

    Same here. A lot of search queries have impacted our site over the weekend by bloating the ram on our search index.

    No good reason at all for these queries:

    query=iop+maryland+comar+requirements
    query=characteristics+of+a+learner+centered+classroom
    query=loans
    query=loandepot+current+heloc+rates
    query=port+jervis+law
    query=highmark+1099+hsa
    query=porn+gynaecoloog+laat+haar+mastruberen
    query=copart
    query=fastest+way+to+get+a+business+loan
    query=mortage+calculator+dc
    query=covid
    query=criminal+lawyers+near+me
    query=best+eye+wash+spray+for+blepharitis+and+dermatitis
    query=heloc+current+interest+rates+today
    query=lendingtree
    query=highmark+login
    query=ersonal+loan
    query=sony+wireless+stereo+headphones+model+mdr+rf985r
    query=%E7%8D%8F%E3%81%95%E3%81%84
    query=04+kodu+ile+i%C5%9Ften+%C3%A7%C4%B1karma
    query=adimod
    query=nk%C3%BC+veteriner+fak%C3%BCltesi
    query=m205+pick+n+pull+denver

    Bingbot's gone mad. I've raised a ticket through Bing Webmaster Tools and await their response,

    4 people found this answer helpful.
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  2. Anonymous
    2025-03-03T23:37:44+00:00

    I started getting these queries today 3-3-2025 17:43 UTC and they have been rather aggressive. This clearly isnt normal crawling process. Its not crawling, its injecting, at least trying to. I am seeing:

    structure+of+the+us+government+chart

    %E6%A5%BD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9C%92

    pago+multas++basura+maipu

    growth+etfs+with+blend+etfs+in+same+portfolio

    Mind you, these are not options anywhere on my site. Why would a bot inject things into a box? it wouldnt. And the pages its showing on, have no crawl tags on them..

    I went to report the traffic as a attempted DDOS attack or something like that, and the CERT site was returning 504 timeouts... I havnt seen bot traffic like this before, so I ended up blocking the agent for now... until it gets its wits back..

    This is not what a crawler should be doing...

    3 people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2025-01-19T22:44:36+00:00

    I have exactly the same issue and have had to block bingbot - would love to know a better solution!

    2 people found this answer helpful.
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  4. Anonymous
    2025-02-13T11:11:44+00:00

    The response I received from Bing Webmaster Tools Support Team was disappointing and misses the point:

    "We have received a response from the engineering team recommending that you update your robots.txt file to "Disallow: /search" to prevent crawlers from accessing and indexing any URLs that contain the "/search" pattern on your website."

    I mean, sure I see that disallowing /search/ and /search is different, but how does that help anyone where this is happening across multiple URLs? How about you stop Bingbot from behaving like this in the first place?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  5. Anonymous
    2025-02-13T08:38:33+00:00

    The problem is search is on every page for us. So blocking /search from indexing etc won't help as the bots are using the search bar on whatever page they land on.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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