When I tried to use Bing’s Site Move Tool to notify Bing about my blog moving to a new domain, I kept on getting mysterious “The sample URLs we tried do not appear to redirect correctly. Please make sure that they redirect permanently to the new destination using 301 redirects” error. My 301 redirect was set up correctly and it worked with Google Webmaster Tools’ change of address. I emailed Bing’s support team with screenshots and they forwarded my request to their Product Group but no response since then. One day I started to monitor my server’s access log and I noticed those lines on my access log when I try to set up the site move:


131.253.26.64 - - [15/May/2015:13:28:25 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 890 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)"
131.253.26.64 - - [15/May/2015:13:29:58 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 890 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)"
131.253.26.64 - - [15/May/2015:13:30:49 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 890 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)"


I started to wonder why my website is returning 403 on those sample urls that Bing was trying. My site didn’t require login to access. I started to suspect that it could be caused by some WordPress plugins and Bad Behavior came down to my list. I tried to disable it and it worked again:


131.253.38.67 - - [15/May/2015:13:32:33 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 47392 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)"


I think Bad Behavior needs some special configuration such as whitelisting Bing to allow access my site in order for this not to happen. It might have caused another problem of mysterious 403 error on Google Webmaster Tools when I hosted my blog on OpenShift as well.