What the Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance Means for SEO

Monday, July 26th, 2010

The proposed unification of Yahoo! and Microsoft Bing, which started in mid 2009, is on par to be rolled out by the end of 2010. This development in the Search Engine Marketing Arena might not seem important initially but it stands to impact the way companies implement their future Search Engine Marketing strategies.

The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance is already starting to make waves in its primary market – North America. In North America the combined Yahoo!/Bing search market share lay just under 30% as of the second quarter of 2010 whilst Google’s search market share was roughly 63%.

Google still holds its impressive 90% lead in the world search market but it is worthwhile to note that the combined Yahoo!/Bing search market share lay at 7.4% as of the second quarter of 2010.

With figures like these it is clear that the Search Alliance is worth keeping an eye on for any company that relies on search engine marketing efforts to generate business, especially in North America.

The official website of the Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance (www.searchalliance.com) states:

“When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by AdCenter) search results. “

What does this mean for Organic SEO?

Both Yahoo! and Bing search domains will remain online but the technology being used to serve up search results will be powered using Bing’s algorithm. With Bing powering the Yahoo! searches as well as the Bing searches it stands to reason that a website that is ranking well on Bing will rank well on Yahoo! as well from mid October 2010 (if the implementation rolls out as scheduled).

In anticipation of these developments it is also worthwhile to start the Bing search engine optimization of your company website sooner rather than later.

UPDATE 09 August 2010:

Yahoo has announced that Bing will start powering Yahoo results in late August.