Bing Indexing - perplexing question

RapidWeaver Classic
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I am perplexed. Bing does not like my website and as far as I can see it is not really indexed. Copying and posting unique text from the site into Bing yields no results but produces and exact match in Google. I went to webmaster tools and it complains about titles that are too short and insufficient content. The thing is my website is primarily a blog so there is masses of unique content. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this strange behaviour and has any suggestions.

I chose RW as I wanted to document my travels offline and then upload when I reach shore with a wifi. This is something you can’t do with cloud platforms like WIX.

My site is www.seacrusader.co.uk

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Hi @Paul_Reading,

Welcome to the wonderful world of SEO.

What you’re seeing, is the result of Google and Bing having different ways of indexing your page.

Bing really likes metatags and structured data - if I look at your site’s source code, only a few meta tags are filled and there’s no structured data (at least not a lot - I didn’t do a thorough analysis, but rather skimmed through the source). If these lack, Bing resorts to plan B: look for header tags. And Bing’s right: you don’t have enough page title headers on your site.

For instance, on your front page, the text “What are we doing?” is not a header, but a paragraph with a really big font. If you replace this with a true header H1, Bing will see it as the page title and index it.

If I scroll further down, I do see headers, which were generated by the Poster stack. These headers are mostly one word sentences, which is something that both Google and Bing don’t like. Headers should be descriptive, so insread of Portland, you could write something like There’s nothing like sailing in Portland!. This sentence contains a few keywords that will trigger both Google and Bing.

Structured data is a bit of a complex subject, but simply put, you’ll list a bit of hidden text that’s just for the search engines that describe what your page is about. In your case, you write articles, so you’d put an Article structured data element in the HEAD section of your pages that contain articles and fill in the information.

Next are meta tags. You have a few meta tags in place, mostly targeted at social media, but are lacking the general ones like page title. Bing cares a lot more about meta tags than Google does, so you could add these to make your site more visible in Bing’s search results.

Google has quite the comprehensive explanation about meta tags here. You add them in the HEAD section of each page.

Cheers,
Erwin

1 Like
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Thanks, I thought meta tags were generated automatically by Rapid Weaver. I expected not to have to go anywhere need coding, I am a yachtsman not a web guru. I was pretty proud with what I have achieved but this is so daunting.

Thanks for explaining it. I don’t know if I can go back through hundreds of pages. Is there no way for the system to automate the generation of these tags?

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Hi, I took a quick look at your site (What are we doing? and News) and noticed that:

  • you do not have H2 headings
  • the TITLE “Sea Crusader Blog” where and what is it about (Sailing, England, Travel) put it also in the TITLE. (I only learned english in school, however I am not sure what your site is about. I have see a video on YouTube, maybe you should take a look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdWTUE9-mDk)
  • i did not see a DESCRIPTION-TAG
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Hi @Paul_Reading,

Yes - RapidWeaver handles meta tags, but Bing would like to see even more meta tags.

Both meta tags and structured data can be added manually (like I explained), or you can automate it using a plugin. For RapidWeaver, by far the most powerful one is SEO Helper ($50, Weaver’s Space). This is a set of stacks that allows you to semi-automatically take care of all SEO requirements. It generates most meta tags automatically, and allows you to add additional meta tags if you need them.

It also allows you to add structured data to your web site by simply adding them using the stack and fill in the required fields.

It completely takes over from RapidWeaver’s built-in meta tag generator.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s only a few minutes of work per page.

For blog posts, you’re very much in the hands of the maker of your blogging solution, as neither RapidWeaver or SEO Helper can intervene in that bit of the website. You can, however, get SEO Helper to inject code in the head of the page where your blog posts reside, which gives you some control over SEO on that bit.

Cheers,
Erwin