I recently developed a website called https://tictactoefree.com and added it to Google and Bing Webmasters. While there are no issues with Google indexing the pages, Bing returned the following message: "403 (Forbidden) Bingbot received an HTTP 403 response when requesting the site map or web channel. Ensure that Bingbot is authorized to access the site map or web channel location." I reached out to their support team and received the next response:
"I have reviewed your query and see that your server may have been configured to only accept requests from Bingbot from specific IP ranges/User Agents. Since Bingbot IP ranges may change over time, you may be accidentally blocking valid Bingbot requests this way. We would be pleased if you could check your server settings to avoid blocking our crawler so that we can properly index your site. To see whether Bingbot requests are really coming from Bing machines instead of suspicious crawlers that are spoofing the Bingbot user agent, use the methods described in How to Verify Bingbot.
Or alternatively, you can identify Bingbot by IP address by matching the crawler's IP address to the list of Bingbot IP addresses.
More information about user-agent changes for Bing crawler Bingbot
Link1: Announcing user-agent change for Bing crawler bingbot | Webmaster Blog.
Link2: Which Crawlers Does Bing Use? - Bing Webmaster Tools"
For now I contacted my hosting provider about the issue. Has anyone else experienced such problem? Thanks in advance for any help!
