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?

been getting a few of these in the last 24 hours or so in one of my sites, curious too. — Rodolfo, Feb 28, 2013 at 18:30

Stephen Ostermiller · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-19 00:50:15Z

12

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:

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

Stephen Ostermiller♦

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answered Mar 1, 2013 at 21:47

Vincent_Bing

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10

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.
– fuxia
Mar 2, 2013 at 19:23
2

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.
– sigurdga
Mar 3, 2013 at 12:06
1

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.
– Rodolfo
Mar 5, 2013 at 16:51
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
– neofutur
Mar 13, 2013 at 2:57
1

Is there a directive in robots.txt to tell bingbot where this special sitemap is? (or if there are no such special sitemap)
– Joelbitar
Mar 13, 2013 at 9:48

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