Over the past few months, the Bing search engine has completely blocked the domain neocities.org, including the front site and all user subdomains (example.neocities.org), from its search index.

This is not a partial demotion, a ranking issue, or a temporary crawl problem. The entire domain is completely excluded.

In addition to excluding neocities.org from search results, when we discovered the block, Bing was also placing what appeared to be a phishing attack against Neocities on the first page of search results. This is not only bad for search results, it’s very possible that it is actively dangerous. After complaints (it required several) they deranked the suspected phishing site, but neocities.org results remain blocked, and it is possibly only a matter of time before another concerning site appears on Bing searches for Neocities (it’s easy to get higher pagerank than a blocked site).

In addition to the safety concerns, this also unfairly affects over 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities, the vast majority of which are personal, artistic, educational, or experimental projects with no commercial or malicious intent. These are brilliant and wonderful sites with billions of human visitors per month and they don’t deserve to be blocked from an entire search engine for no reason.

We have repeatedly attempted to resolve this through Bing’s official webmaster and support channels, and a few internal channels. Despite these efforts, Bing has declined to reverse the block or provide a clear, actionable explanation for it. At this point, we have exhausted all reasonable avenues for remediation except public disclosure.

Because of this, we are recommending that Neocities users, and the broader internet in general, not use Bing or search engines that source their results from Bing until this issue is resolved.

In addition to Bing, there are other search engines that currently rely on Bing’s search results, including but not limited to DuckDuckGo.

If you use Bing or Bing-powered search engines, Neocities sites will not appear in your search results, regardless of content quality, originality, or compliance with webmaster guidelines. If any Neocities-like sites appear on these results, they may be active phishing attacks against Neocities and should be treated with caution.

What This Is Not

To be clear:

  • This is not the result of widespread malware or phishing on Neocities
  • This is not due to a technical misconfiguration that Bing has identified
  • This is not the result of policy violations communicated to us in a meaningful way
  • This is not because we haven’t made multiple good-faith attempts to contact Bing for resolution
  • This is not because of low quality AI slop, of which Neocities has almost none
  • This is not because of suborigin issues (Bing has documented that they understand suborigins)

Neocities allows users to publish HTML, just like every other general-purpose web host. We have always responded to valid abuse reports and comply with applicable law. In addition, we have an active and sophisticated moderation process that removes the vast majority of malicious sites pre-emptively before they are even indexed by search engines.

Why We’re Posting This Publicly

We did not want to write this post. We try very hard to have a good relationship with search engine providers. We would much rather quietly resolve this issue with Bing staff and move on.

But after months of attempting to engage constructively through multiple channels, it became clear that silence only harms our users. Especially those who don’t realize their sites are invisible on some search engines.

We decided to post this so that:

  • users understand that their sites aren’t appearing on Bing or Bing-powered search engines
  • web users can make informed choices about what search engines they can trust to be safe and reliable
  • the situation is documented transparently and publicly

Our Recommendation

If you care about discovering independent websites made by real human beings, personal pages, and creative projects on the open web, we recommend using search engines other than Bing.

At the time of writing, Neocities sites continue to be indexed normally by most major search engines, including Google.

We will update this post if Bing reverses its decision or meaningfully engages with us to resolve the issue (if you work at Bing or Microsoft and can fix this, please contact us, we would really love to talk to you). Until then, we cannot recommend Bing or Bing-powered search engines to our users, where you will not even find this blog post in the search results.