We have more MSNBot troubles to unfortunately bring to you. Microsoft Bing’s spider, MSNBot, is apparently not listening to directives they should be listening to. In this case, it is the crawl delay command, where a couple users are claiming Microsoft Bing’s MSNBot is not honoring. There is a thread on the topic at Bing Forums and no Microsoft representative has come in to clarify yet.

We know that Microsoft wrote both in 2008 and 2009 that Webmasters can add the crawl delay directive in their robots.txt file and it should slow the bot down.

In this case, these webmasters are using delays of 5 and 10, with no recourse from MSNBot. Take a look at events.berkeley.edu/robots.txt and you will see one example. But these webmasters are reporting extreme high crawl rates from MSNBot, which is not uncommon.

Forum discussion at Bing Forums.