The effect of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal on your website
You've probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.
Yahoo is going to give up their own search technology and use
Microsoft's search technology instead. Bing.com will power the organic
and the paid search results on Yahoo (except for premium ads on Yahoo).
Self-serve advertising (i.e. the AdWords competitor) will be managed by
Microsoft's AdCenter. Microsoft will get access to Yahoo's search
technology and can use it to improve its own search technology.
What does this mean for your website?
You should optimize for Bing.com.
Yahoo/Bing will have a search market share of at least 15% (that's the
current market share of MSN and Yahoo combined - some statistics show a
much higher market share).
If you do not optimize some of your website pages for Bing, you'll lose
a lot of visitors and sales. Fortunately, IBP's top 10 optimizer already
enables you to optimize your website for Bing.
The optimizer works with the US version of Bing as well as with many
country versions. Recent research has shown that Bing's traffic is more
likely to convert.
Yahoo's inbound link data will probably be lost.
Yahoo is the search engine that currently returns the most inbound link
data. When Yahoo drops its index, that data will probably be lost. We
recommend using IBP's link manager if you want to get an overview of the
websites that link to your website.
The link manager in IBP will retrieve all links that are returned by
Yahoo, Bing, Google and other search engines.
A big PPC provider will be gone, an even bigger provider will appear.
Microsoft will provide the search ads for Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo will
close its own paid search offerings. That means that you will be able to
manage your ads for both Yahoo and Bing in one user interface. It
probably also means rising bid prices on Yahoo and Bing.
Yahoo might close some of their websites.
Yahoo might put its Internet directory into question as well as their
alternative search applications SearchMonkey and SearchBOSS.
Applications such as Yahoo Maps might also be reconsidered because Bing
offers similar services.
There will be two independent search result pages.
Yahoo will have full control over the user interface of their search
form. The ordering of the results, the layout and the whole search focus
can be different from Bing. That means that you still might have to
optimize your website for both search engines.
The deal still needs shareholder and legal approval. Yahoo and Microsoft
hope that the changes will be in place by early 2010. If you want to
participate from the change as soon as possible, you should optimize
some of your web pages for Bing now.
Optimize different pages of your website for different search engines
and different keywords. What works with one search engine might not work
with another. Optimize each web page for a dedicated search
engine/keyword combination to get better results.
Did you know that, after investing thousands, sometimes hundred of thousands of dollars developing a Web site, businesses often discover that the site is nowhere to be found on the Internet? Failing to take your Web site's search engine visibility into consideration when making site development decisions is an untimely and very expensive mistake.
How do you get the real internet users who are online right now, actively looking for a specific product or service like yours?
Over the past seven years, our SEO programs have put more companies on the real track to success by placing their rankings on all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the others.
Resources
- Google Search Optimization Guidelines
- MSN Search Optimization Guidelines
- Yahoo Search Optimization Guidelines
- Wikipedia: Search Engine Optimization
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