Yahoo SERP delivering Bing's organic results

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance announced that Yahoo’s organic search results (English language in the U.S. and Canada) have switched over and are now being powered by Bing – the latest step in their combined battle with Google.  The first question that marketers should ask is, “How will this affect me?”  The answer to that will depend on a number of factors, not least how you currently rank on Bing versus Yahoo. Add the positive or negative swing you may see in traffic for Yahoo in the coming month, and another question many marketers will be asking — given the increase in market share for Bing-powered results, is, “Should I change my website optimization to cater more to Bing?”  The short answer is – no.

Trust the Data
Website owners should review their search analytics and ranking reports to ascertain if they are having success in Google for the keyword phrases they are targeting.  If the website is already ranked more highly on Google than on Bing or Yahoo and Google is driving substantial traffic to your site, you wouldn’t dream of changing that. As such, it is not in your best interest to re-optimize your website to suit Bing over a market share that is under half that of Google.  If the website was previously only having success on Yahoo and all of your traffic was coming from there, then it is likely that you were in need of some further search engine optimization (SEO) for Google and Bing in the first place.

How will it work?
While Bing’s results will be powering Yahoo, both websites will deliver their results differently – it is understood that 22 of the 24 factors that make up a Yahoo results page will still be controlled by Yahoo. As an example, Bing currently provides their “quick access” data and “share” capabilities in some results, while Yahoo will be taking the underlying organic results and delivering them with a Yahoo-twist. This may include any number of extra features such as extra imagery or a NASDAQ ticker symbol, as well as their own related searches and search suggestions, rather than Bing’s.

Remember that once Yahoo has the data from Bing, they can do with it what they will – adding sources to enrich the results based on what they know about you, your searching preferences and the preferences of Yahoo users at large for similar queries. Don’t expect their organic results to look exactly the same as the Bing results just because they came from the same original index.  Likewise, Bing layers on extra data, too, so the information that is sent to Yahoo is not exactly the same as information displayed on their results pages.

What does this mean? Does It Matter?
This is a big step for both Microsoft and Yahoo, and gives Bing a far wider audience to entertain with its vastly-improved search results.  Their combined market share (5.2 billion monthly searches – 31.6 percent of the U.S. market and 8.6 percent of the Canadian market) means that website owners should start to take more notice of Bing, although they remain strides behind Google in market share.

Depending on how a website previously ranked on Bing or Yahoo, you may see a substantial gain or loss of search traffic in the coming month.  As with all things organic, we shouldn’t make any knee-jerk decisions on optimization, but a good understanding of your existing rankings and traffic across both Yahoo and Bing will help to predict how the coming month is going to affect your business.  If you currently rank higher on Bing than you do on Yahoo for your desired keyword phrases, then you are in good shape and should see increased traffic as the Bing search volumes explode.  If, however, you are not well ranked on Bing and yet are on Yahoo, you should expect to see the converse – traffic is likely to drop significantly and expectations on results should be managed.  For those in this situation, this begs the question, “How do I improve my ranking on Bing?”

While Bing’s new-found market share could be considered an opportunity from an SEO perspective, webmasters and marketers should think carefully before plowing in with changes.  For example, longer URLs appear to be detrimental for Bing, but a lot less of an issue for Google. Therefore, it may not be worth the risk of changing your URLs to accommodate this optimization consideration and risk losing credibility with Google (or Bing) in the short to medium term.

If you are building a new website, then naturally you will want to avoid any of the penalties (negative commonalities) that Bing may factor in on top of Google’s. However, overall, the message is that the ranking factors in the algorithms of Google and Bing are not terribly dissimilar and are generally growing closer, so if you are optimizing for one, you are likely heading in the right direction for the other.

What’s a webmaster to do?
The webmaster tools at Bing and Google can help you to identify any issues that are preventing your website from being indexed and, in some cases, from ranking well.  As for your search engine optimization strategy in the wake of the Search Alliance, the best option for most websites will be to prioritize Google optimization, which continues to dominate query volume and also features a good number of the ranking factors that Bing is utilizing, rather than dramatically altering your SEO strategy to suit Bing.

Steve Hall is Sr. Partner and Director of Organic Search for GroupM Search and Outrider North America.