NoIndex/NoFollow are Meta Tags that can be used to advise search engine spiders to avoid indexing a web page. There are a number of reasons why you might want to use these tags such as avoiding duplicate content or hiding more private details.

The tags are currently supported by other major search engines like Google and Yahoo, so the issue appears to be impacting Bing only. Heres what Brett Yount from Bings webmaster team had to say:

Hi,

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and MSNBot ignoring robots tags in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, Ill do the leg work for you.

If youve got pages using these tags Id recommend checking them in Bing and taking appropriate action if theyve been accessed incorrectly. If youre after other ways to prevent spiders from indexing your content check out the other methods supported by the Robots exclusion standard.

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