by samSo it’s not been long since Microsoft did a complete overhaul on their Bing Webmaster Tools back in July. The team that did it rebuilt the tool from the ground up, enabling it to collect a whole new host of data. They took on crawling, indexing, and traffic and displayed it in charts containing up to 6 months of data in a similar form to the way Google’s Webmaster Tools operates.
Since then, the search alliance between Microsoft and Yahoo has grown increasingly closer, with Yahoo announcing their migration of European organic search results over to Bing’s search index in August. Now that Bing is almost entirely powering Yahoo’s organic search results, they have decided to integrate Yahoo’s traffic data into their Webmaster Tools as well. Your readers who have seen a spike in your website traffic charts over the past couple of weeks and were wondering where it came from will now understand why.
The integrated data can be found by clicking the Traffic tab and viewing the Page Traffic or Traffic Summary Report. Impression and click numbers will rise as a result of the combined data numbers, and click-through rates will be affected according to the difference in these two numbers. Though you must bear in mind that these changes reflect the numbers only, your ranking will remain unaffected by the combination of data.
An unfortunate annoyance to those interested in search engine optimisation is the inability to filter the results to see results from Yahoo vs. Bing. Only a combination of the two is currently available, though perhaps this feature will be implemented in the future.
For those of us in the UK who wonder whether anyone worries about using search engine optimisation for Bing, perhaps you’d be right in not being too concerned, as Google still holds over a 90% share in the search market. It is, however, more likely to affect our friends across the pond, where the playing field is a little more even.