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Bilbo may not have told anyone about going away, but Gandalf did lock the door after him. (At least that's heavily implied.)
About one year is not a very long time. What kind of society is Hobbiton where you have show yourself every day outside or else people presume your home is abandoned and sell off your stuff?
This isn’t the modern world. Most people in Middle-Earth don’t just randomly go off traveling great distances without telling anyone. This is even more true of Hobbits, who almost never leave the Shire (or Bree for the ones living there). On the contrary randomly disappearing without explanation is in fact very unusual and doing so for a year is a rather long time in this setting, and even more so for a Hobbit.
