Bing appears to have silently blocked the .com.et TLD from search index

2 points

20 days ago

I run an online technology school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (yared-coding.com.et). Around May 18, 2026, my site completely vanished from Bing — site: operator returns zero results, including the homepage.

I initially assumed it was specific to my domain. Then I checked others:

- site:cbe.com.et → 0 results (Commercial Bank of Ethiopia) - site:jiji.com.et → 0 results (largest Ethiopian marketplace) - site:tsehaybank.com.et → 0 results - site:extremeafrica.com.et → 0 results

Every single .com.et domain I tested returns zero results on Bing. All of them are fully visible and indexed on Google.

Bing Webmaster Tools for my site shows: all URLs "Indexed successfully", no manual actions, no robots.txt issues, no noindex tags, no crawl errors. Nothing. The indexing system and the serving system are clearly disconnected.

I've gone through support tickets. The response was a boilerplate reply about "insufficient ranking signals" — which makes no sense for sites like the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia.

This appears to be a silent, undocumented TLD-level block of .com.et — affecting every Ethiopian commercial website — with no communication from Microsoft and no path to resolution through official support channels.

The Neocities situation earlier this year (1.5M sites blocked) only got resolved after Ars Technica covered it. Has anyone else observed this? Does anyone have a contact at Bing/Microsoft who handles indexing at the infrastructure level?

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