Site impressions dropped 99% after DNS migration — Discovered but not crawled on all pages despite normal crawl rate and IndexNow enabled

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Site impressions dropped 99% after DNS migration — Discovered but not crawled on all pages despite normal crawl rate and IndexNow enabled

simon karios 20

My site exploremoreturkey.com experienced a significant Bing impression drop from May 7 2026 following a DNS migration from Cloudflare to Hostinger. DNS was restored to Cloudflare on May 19. Crawl rate shows normal (5/10), sitemaps show Success, IndexNow is enabled, but URL Inspection shows 'Discovered but not crawled — issues preventing indexation' on all pages. No manual action shown. Site has been live since 2022. Requesting review."

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Answer 1

Rayyan Fawad 1,170

A 99% drop in Bing impressions after a dual DNS migration usually means Bingbot cached a hard failure (like a 5xx server error, a connection timeout, or a misconfigured firewall rule) during the period your site was pointed to Hostinger, causing it to throttle deeper rendering queues. Even though your sitemaps show "Success" and IndexNow is actively pinging the API, the "Discovered but not crawled" status indicates that Bing's backend crawler has placed your URLs into a low-priority processing backlog due to that recent unreliability. To kickstart the recovery, first verify that Cloudflare’s proxy or security settings (like Bot Management, under-attack mode, or aggressive JS challenge walls) aren't accidentally blocking or challenging Bingbot requests since switching back on May 19. If your server logs confirm Bingbot is getting clean 200 OK responses, use the URL Inspection tool in Bing Webmaster Tools to manually request indexing on a few core landing pages, which forces a live, real-time crawl and forces Bing's rendering engine to clear its stale, cached error states.

simon karios 20 Reputation points

2026-06-05T10:17:42.21+00:00
Thank you for the detailed response. I've now checked all Cloudflare settings as suggested:

Bot Fight Mode: OFF

Block AI Bots: Set to "Do not block (allow crawlers)"

Under Attack Mode: OFF

No WAF custom rules blocking crawlers

Security.txt: OFF

Cloudflare is not challenging or blocking Bingbot in any way. All bot traffic is permitted through freely.

I have also made the following fixes since the original drop on May 7:

DNS restored to Cloudflare (May 19)

robots.txt corrected — orphaned Disallow rules moved into correct User-agent block

45 duplicate posts deleted from the database with 301 redirects in place

446 redirect chains audited and 32 chains collapsed to direct jumps

IndexNow enabled via RankMath — pinging Bing on every publish/update

Sitemaps resubmitted — both showing Success status

I am now using URL Inspection to manually request indexing on core pages to force live crawls as suggested. The site has been live and stable since 2022 with no manual actions showing in Webmaster Tools.

Is there anything further on Bing's side that could be causing the persistentThank you for the detailed response. I've now checked all Cloudflare settings as suggested:

Bot Fight Mode: OFF

Block AI Bots: Set to "Do not block (allow crawlers)"

Under Attack Mode: OFF

No WAF custom rules blocking crawlers

Security.txt: OFF

Cloudflare is not challenging or blocking Bingbot in any way. All bot traffic is permitted through freely.

I have also made the following fixes since the original drop on May 7:

DNS restored to Cloudflare (May 19)

robots.txt corrected — orphaned Disallow rules moved into correct User-agent block

45 duplicate posts deleted from the database with 301 redirects in place

446 redirect chains audited and 32 chains collapsed to direct jumps

IndexNow enabled via RankMath — pinging Bing on every publish/update

Sitemaps resubmitted — both showing Success status

I am now using URL Inspection to manually request indexing on core pages to force live crawls as suggested. The site has been live and stable since 2022 with no manual actions showing in Webmaster Tools.

Is there anything further on Bing's side that could be causing the persistent "Discovered but not crawled" status despite these fixes? Is a manual review possible?
Rayyan Fawad 1,170 Reputation points

2026-06-05T10:21:54.0966667+00:00

The persistent "Discovered but not crawled" backlog following a clean Cloudflare audit confirms that Bingbot has deprioritized your crawl budget due to the historical reliability drops recorded during the double DNS migration. When Bingbot registers consecutive host-unreachable or heavy timeout states, its automation automatically throttles the crawl velocity map and shunts incoming indexation requests to a secondary, lower-priority parsing queue to conserve processing infrastructure. Since your local firewall, robots.txt, and live 200 OK headers are fully verified as optimal, this is strictly a waiting game for Bing's backend scheduler to refresh its system health scores for your domain.

To accelerate a manual verification bypass, your best next step is to head into your Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard, navigate to the IndexNow tab, and explicitly use the manual URL submission tool to push your 5 to 10 most critical landing pages directly to the API endpoint again. This forces an explicit, high-priority webhook notification that bypasses the standard discovery loop. If the live server logs confirm that Bingbot handles these direct fetches successfully without errors, the underlying system health metrics will adjust over the next few processing cycles, gradually draining the "Discovered but not crawled" backlog.

If this solution helps resolve the indexing block for your site, please click the Accept Answer button on this post to help other community members tracking the same issue find this fix!