OpenOffice.org Homepage Missing in Bing.com SERP

Blogger Ian McAnerin discovered a very interesting fact about Bing.com search result: the homepage of OpenOffice.org is missing in the results! Though, Ian wrote that the entire site is not appearing in the results, and he guessed the reason: rivalry! (OpenOffice.org is the competitor of Microsoft Office). But, later SearchEngineLand.com investigated this issue and found that the only homepage of the site is missing in the results, while other pages from OpenOffice.org are appearing in Bing.com results.

A query site:openoffice.org shows that the pages from this site are indexed in Bing.com search index, and the problem is simply due to a technical mis-configuration on the OpenOffice.org servers. SearchEngineLand.com shows this fact by accessing the OOo homepage with different user agents.

With user agent MSNbot, HTTP header response from the server looks like this:

http://www.openoffice.org/

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: openoffice.org

User-Agent: msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden

This clearly indicates that the problem is not from Microsoft’s side. :)

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