Some of you may have heard the news last week that Microsoft has struck a deal with Yahoo! after more than a year of negotiations (you can read about it in more detail on Search Engine Land’s website). This means that Microsoft will soon provide Yahoo with a search facility that will replace Yahoo’s own search engine. In short, Yahoo is no longer going to be involved in search, but will continue to exist as a portal for news and entertainment which it also provides now.
This means that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is going to have a much larger market share than it currently has. Not only will Bing provide search on Microsoft’s web sites such as MSN, but also for Yahoo. It means that how your website performs on Bing is going to be more important as it’s going to be a much bigger referrer of visitors.
Microsoft is also going to be providing the sponsored links to Yahoo, which will replace Yahoo’s Search Marketing offering with Microsoft AdCenter. So you may also want to think about trialing a pay per click campaign with Adcenter to run alongside your Google Adwords campaign if you’re using sponsored links to boost your presence in the search engines.
None of this is going to happen immediately, it will be rolled out sometime next year, but you need to be aware of these big changes, which are going to happen in the not too distant future.
So, in the meantime, you need to think about improving rankings on Bing, or at least starting to monitor results and traffic from Bing.
I’ve always rather liked Yahoo as a search engine and it’s always been pretty quick at indexing new sites and changes to websites, such as optimisation on the pages, so I’ll miss Yahoo! However, I’ve found Bing to be rather slow at indexing new sites and new optimisation. In fact, one website I worked on a while ago, I put a 301 redirect on some domains so that the search results were consistent for this particular site. Google and Yahoo followed the redirect in no time, it took Microsoft’s search engine Live (now renamed Bing) almost a year to follow the redirect! So you may find things are a lot slower with Bing. Hopefully changes they plan to make to their search technology may help.
So, if you’re not at all familiar with Bing, now’s the time to familiarise yourself as once Yahoo search is withdrawn, all those lovely rankings you may be getting on Yahoo will be lost forever!
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Great post, thanks for sharing. I just wish that more people would really share. I’ll be back shortly to read and learn more.
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