The English Guy’s Personal Blog

I use Google for searching, mostly because I find their results accurate and (most of the time) spam-free.

Lately however I’ve been experimenting more with Bing and Yahoo. They seem to be the same. So much so that they have the same results for the search terms I’m using, in the same positions. Makes me wonder…

Anyway, on to my point. Bing, your search results are awful. I select ‘Results only from the UK’ and here’s a slice of what I get, for the search term ‘school signage‘:

• Position 10: they can’t even spell the word ‘signage’ properly (they spelt it ‘sinage’), yet you have them at position 10? They’re also position 21, apparently duplicating content, you allow that do you?
• Position 42: is a PDF file leading to an article. Surely when searching the web, I’m looking for websites?
• Position 63: Nothing to do with school signage.
• Position 72: Nothing to do with school signage.
• Position 82: Nothing to do with school signage. The title even says so!
• Position 95: Nothing to do with school signage.

Ok so this is the first 100 results out of 19,000. Admittedly no-one looks past the first three pages (if that!).

So my reasoning for this was because I was looking for the company I work for, GRS Sign Company, for their results under the same search term. Limiting this a little to ‘school signage lincolnshire‘, again on Bing, here goes:

• Position 12: Finally! We’re on there, but oddly not the GRS category for school signs, why is that Bing?
• Position 13: Lincolnshire tree services? Are you serious Bing? And again at position 20?
• Position 25, 26, 30: Council web pages?
• Position 29: A school?

Ok so why is this happening? Surely a simple search term like ‘school signage‘ should net me only those websites and webpages that deal with ‘school signage‘? Out of the 16,400 results above, the first 30 have at least 5 bogus (maybe bogus isn’t a good word, let’s say ‘inaccurate’) results…

I read that Bing (and Yahoo) both set their store by how many incoming links a website has, to grade and position them in results. How is that useful? That’s easily manipulatable by scammers, and companies as large as yours should know that. How easy would it be to create an innocent page on say, breakfast cereal, get hundreds if not thousands of incoming links, let it sit for a month or two, then swap the content out for mobile telephone offers, or worse, porn?

My family’s business chooses not to have outgoing and incoming links to competitors, or related businesses, because we want to stand alone on the product we produce. There is nothing wrong with that. Google seems to agree, our links are fairly high on their searches, but not on yours (and Yahoo’s).

Can someone please clarify a little? How can I structure the website to better gain rank on their search listings? It is well written HTML/CSS/PHP/JQuery, I try to follow all the rules, but because we don’t want to clutter our business pages with incoming links, we’re penalised?