The English Guy's Personal Blog » css

Bing, Your Search Results are Awful

richard — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:55:01 +0000

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?

Bing/Yahoo Optimisation Advice – Utter Nonsense

richard — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:22:45 +0000

I have a site I’ve worked on for years, GRS Sign Company, it’s owned by my family so I have a vested interest to work hard on it. I follow many if not all of the generally gathered advice about SEO/SEM, and I have to say, get generally good results.

But what irritates me to no end is Yahoo and Bing. They don’t notice the site, or barely do so. One of the major pieces of advice especially for Bing is, add quality content, consistently. Interesting, given that GRS updates their site every week with new photos of their work, we write about the work, use keywords efficiently but not overly so. Yet, in search results in Bing, we’re never found. Odd don’t you think?

The same thing happens with Yahoo.

Now, one of the ‘advice’ sites I’ve read up on says that Yahoo and Bing like proper use of meta tags. Ok, interesting. So let’s search for ‘corporate signage’ on Bing and this site, www.modelsignage.co.uk, appears No. 1. Just take a look at the section for that. The only meta tag is for http-equiv. The document is relatively old, written in html 4.01 Transitional and it’s table-based layout! Clearly Bing has put a cutting edge site right at the top of 11,500,000 results…

So Tired of IE6

richard — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:59:32 +0000

I, like many developers and designers out there, am so damned tired of IE6.

Can’t people move on and get themselves a decent modern browser? It is literally a click away. Opera and FireFox are so easy to install and get running, I installed Opera on a machine the other day and it was as simple as one click to download and one or two to install.

IE6‘s problems with css cause so many headaches, it’s a real ball ache.

On Porting WordPress to Drupal

richard — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:37:30 +0000

Several months ago I was approached to port one of my WordPress themes (OpenAir) to Drupal. Bear in mind I’d never played with Drupal whatsoever, but I said yes just to get some experience. It worked well, although there are some things that can’t be done, with my level of knowledge at this point, at least. I imagine I’ll learn more soon and catch up.

So this weekend, I was asked to give a chat on Skype on how I ported the WP theme to Drupal, so it will be this Saturday afternoon sometime. The Drupal camp is in Portland Oregon I believe. Should be interesting.

Getting in the spirit of things, I’m going to be porting another one of my WP themes to Drupal tomorrow to get ready for this, going over some of the things I’ve done so I know what I’m talking about. I’m thinking a fairly easy theme, like Expression Blue, or Reclamation.

Releasing This Theme (Natural Green)

richard — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:25:31 +0000

So I’ve finally got around to releasing this theme. Thanks to those who helped out. Thanks to Mac for persuading me to put it up as a premium theme.

There are a couple of bits and pieces that I will be updating on it, possibly adding another menu item along the bottom menu bar, making it something settable in the admin backend. But that’s for another day.

For now, on to other themes and updating them for WP-2.8 and that’s quite a few!

Anyway, take a look at the theme release page: Natural Green WordPress Theme, released as a premium theme, for sale for £29.95 (that’s about $40 or so). Not bad for such a unique theme!

You May Have Noticed the New Theme…

richard — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:08:56 +0000

This is something I’ve been working on for some time now, and only in the past couple of week have I really had the time, and effort, to finish it up – the Natural Green WordPress Theme. So this is the debut so to speak, to iron out any kinks I, or you, may encounter. If you notice something please comment about it on this thread.

Just one or two more refinements and you’ll be able to get it, promise!

Ikon WP Theme

richard — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:59:22 +0000

Just got finished with my new theme, although it has been working for some time on my main site. The Ikon WordPress Theme is a highly configurable three column theme, allowing the blog owner to set where the sidebars appear, as well as other options such as comments, posted-by, tags and so on.

More will follow as I finish up the accompanying BBPress Theme and Admin Theme.

Work on Ikon Theme Progresses

richard — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:58:35 +0000

I am pretty happy with the progress of my new theme on my main site. It’s called ‘Ikon’ and will be a premium wordpress theme release, with hopefully, a soon-to-be-completed bbpress theme as well.

BBpress isn’t such a strong point for me as wordpress but hopefully with this theme under my belt as well as others, I’ll add that feather to my cap and get more in tune with it. Time will tell, I’m going to try to finish it off tonight!

Drupal Theme Ports

richard — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:14:05 +0000

I have had a request from someone to take my OpenAir WP theme to Drupal and so over the past week I have been messing around with it. Although I think that Drupal is a bit more complex than WordPress for theming purposes, and I am far more comfortable with WP, I think I could get used to it and maybe port a few more themes over.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the Drupal has the administration theme built in to the overall theme package, if you want it. Not a good thing though, from my perspective. The themes I’ve been examining to find out how they did it, have all the css mixed in and not in what I would call order. Picky I know, but I like the page structure to come first, then the bits and pieces like text, links etc.,

Should be finished soon anyway, and I’ve been testing it on testblog6.

A Few Updates

richard — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:43:07 +0000

This blog is going through a few updates. This is because I’ve finally decided to get off my arse and finish off the theme, and for that matter, to fully integrate the bbpress installation that sites underneath it. So it will be a combined wordpress/bbpress theme, which can be downloaded as one, or separately. When I’m done I’ll post it.

I was thinking of naming the theme after the painting, The Son of Man. Good idea?