I have several sites with dynamic links to products, where the product attributes are encoded into the URL. e.g.
- https://example.com/products/{"product_code":"Widget","size":"gargantuan"}
- https://example.com/products/{"product_code":"Box","color":"red"}
I've created error handlers to catch any attempts to load non-existent products -- perhaps typos or discontinued products in static links to these products.
To my surprise, I'm getting lots of error messages of attempts to load products that have never existed, and they're all coming from bingbots, e.g.
- https://example.com/products/{"product_code":"widget","size":"gargantuan"}
- https://example.com/products/{"product_code":"34fgl random text","color":"red"}
I'm seeing misspellings of product codes, incorrect case, and lots of seemingly random product codes. Again, these are all coming from bingbots, and they're products that have never existed (nor had links to them that could have been crawled).
Does bing attempt to crawl random variations on dynamic URLs? I contacted Microsoft/Bing for support, and perhaps I needed to ask them to bump it up a tier, but they didn't seem to understand what I was asking.
ETA 04/30/20: There was an error in my original analysis. The incorrect product codes coming from bingbots seem to be limited to the ones with case issues. The more random strings seems to be coming from users.
