Last week, Louise and I had a discussion about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, Yahoo and what effects this may have on your website next year. The interview was recorded as part of Louise’s Blog Talk Radio Show and you can listen to the recording here.
If you’ve not taken much notice of Bing to date, then you do need to start taking notice now. At some point next year, the new deal between Microsoft and Yahoo will take effect and Bing will begin to serve results on Yahoo. Yahoo’s own search engine will no longer exist and will be replaced by results from Bing. If you’re currently getting good results on Yahoo, then those results could disappear overnight.
The principles of SEO remain the same for Bing; whatever you do for good results on Google should work for good results on Bing as well. However, you may find that changes you make to your site will take longer to show up on Bing than on Google. The downside of the new deal is that it gives us even less choice in search – only really two search engines to choose from. A far cry from when I started out in SEO almost 10 years ago when there were loads of search engines to choose from and everyone seemed to have a different preference.
At the moment Bing is probably only referring a small amount of visitors to your site, but this is set to grow, so it’s worth checking the quality of those visitors and checking how your site is performing on the search engine. You could even try out the Microsoft Adcenter pay per click advertising platform. At the moment it’s much cheaper than Google Adwords so won’t cost much to try it out.
There’s going to be a lot of changes in search in 2010, so you need to start preparing your website and ensuring those changes don’t affect your site too much.
