Bing Penalty

[RyanKent]

I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing.

Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results.

Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties?

Here is what I have done so far:

• http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request?

• Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856

• there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post).

Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

[RobertFisher]

Ryan,

I am assuming you have gone into Bing Webmaster Tools, but in case you have not, here is info re determining if a penalty exists:

Bing says:To determine if a penalty has completely blocked your site from the Bing index, log in to Bing Webmaster Tools, and review the messages to the webmaster on the Home tab. If no messages about penalties are found, select the registered site in question from the SITES list, and then review the Index Summary chart on the Dashboard tab. If the number of pages indexed has dropped down to zero, then your site has a severe index penalty levied against it. Note that Bing Webmaster Tools does not currently display the status of lesser index penalties. (NOTE: Italics above are mine)

On the chance you have been penalized, here is the link to reconsideration; Bing Support Re Reconsideration

I have not suffered a penalty on Bing and called a few friends and none have experience. Sorry I could not be more help.

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the advice Robert.

Bing WMT Index Summary shows zero pages indexed.

The site has no major issues in terms of malware, hidden content, etc. The site does have issues with duplicate content and thin content. I am working with the site owner to resolve these issues.

Is there any means to determine if the penalty is manual or algorithmic? Since the site's home page has been removed should I assume it is a manual penalty? The articles I referenced above seem to indicate Bing will algorithmically remove a site from it's index if it feels there are content issues.

[RobertFisher]

I would assume it is manual and begin the process of reconsideration (immediately due to them taking a while - some two to three months). The reason I say that is that there is nothing in Site:url. I cannot think of any other reason that there would be zero indexed pages showing. 
Have you looked on Bing for cached pages (out of curiosity more than anything)?