Bingbot seems to be adding "ForceRecrawl: 0" to URLs when crawling my sites

Posted by Louis Somers on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Louis Somers
Published on 2011-10-26T22:32:11Z Indexed on 2011/11/27 2:02 UTC
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I'm seeing this in the iis-logs of two websites that I maintain:

GET /an/existing/page/on/my/site+ForceRecrawl:+0 - 80 - 207.46.195.105 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+bingbot/2.0;++http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

I get about one or two of these per day from these IP addresses: 207.46.195.105, 65.52.110.190.. an more, all belonging to msnbot-ip.search.msn.com

Probably Microsoft has a bug in their crawler? Any way, doing a search on "ForceRecrawl: 0" in major search engines comes up with a bunch of random sites. Doing the search on StackOverflow or here gave no results (to my amazement). Am I the only one seeing this? I first noticed these on the 9th of this month, and I'm seeing them pass almost daily since...

Another thing that I think is crazy, is that the URL http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm redirects to mail.live.com (hotmail).

Currently I'm returning 404's but I'm considering to catch these, strip the trailing " ForceRecrawl: 0" and process as if it were a legitimate url.

Could anyone shed some light on this? Could it have to do with some configuration or so in Bing's Webmaster Tools?

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