Bingbot request for trafficbasedsspsitemap.xml which does not exist

Question

The logs for a website I manage show a request for a non-existent file by Bingbot. The details of the request are

• Path: /trafficbasedsspsitemap.xml
• Useragent: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
• IP address: 65.55.213.244 (reverse lookup resolves to msnbot-65-55-213-244.search.msn.com)

What reason is Bingbot looking for this file? What does "Traffic Based SSP Site Map" mean?

Solution

This is Vincent from Bing Webmaster Tools.

This was a Bingbot checking for an XML sitemap generated by the Bing Sitemap Plugin (Beta) for IIS and Apache - see the following for more details:

• Bing Sitemap Plugin (Beta) - Bing Webmaster Tools Help & How-To Center
• Building Sitemaps Manually?… Stop Until You Read This! - Bing Webmaster Blog

You shouldn't see this kind of discovery request very often.

Comments

[Admin]

been getting a few of these in the last 24 hours or so in one of my sites, curious too.

[Admin]

I've been seeing lots of these too

[fuxia]

The crawler does not ask the robots.txt and it doesn’t look into sitemap.xml – it just uses some made-up path again and again? This should be fixed fast.

[sigurdga]

I checked one of my hosts and it gets this request once per minute. I hope some Bingbot people are able to fix this soon.

[Rodolfo]

I'm getting this request about once a day per site it seems (with and without "www."), though sometimes twice to the same site within 30 minutes.

[neofutur]

I m also seeing way too many requests of this type in my error_log on the few servers where I havent blacklisted bingbot already . . . well, one more reason to blacklist this buggy bot

[Percy Zahl]

Is there a directive in robots.txt to tell bingbot where this special sitemap is? (or if there are no such special sitemap)