Yahoo!'s Bing Crawler and SEO | The Digital Clicks Blog
From August 3rd, 2011, Yahoo! will be employing Bing's search algorithms on their European Yahoo! properties, as they did in the USA last August. This could have a noticeable effect on the SEO elements of Internet marketing in the UK, as any marketers that draw large amounts of traffic from Yahoo!’s search engine may see their rankings change as a result of switching to the Bing crawler. Yahoo! has suggested that companies relying on Yahoo!’s organic search results should be prepared to optimise their websites for the Bing crawler. They said that companies should compare keywords on both Yahoo! and Bing, considering any causal changes, and make appropriate changes to PPC advertising strategies to compensate for fluctuations. The adoption of the Bing algorithm across Yahoo! should lead to a more streamlined path of growth for the partnered services. Last month’s Rosetta study posited that although the Bing-Yahoo! search alliance is still trailing Google, the partnered services presented significant levels of competition in the financial and retail sectors. These numbers should catch the eye of any SEO services and Internet marketers in these industries who may be losing out on a potentially lucrative market by neglecting to optimise for the combined search. The adoption of Bing's algorithm will ensure that historical users of Yahoo! will receive the same apparent niche benefits as those using the comparatively new Bing. Until now, Yahoo! and Bing have been partnered but not unified outside of the US. The ‘decision engine’ can now refine its appeal in certain niches using a unified set of search data from around the globe. Yahoo! is not making the transition to Bing paid search results yet, so Internet marketers can continue to monitor and utilise Yahoo! PPC ads in the same manner. Though the transition is imminent, they have said that they will provide notice before merging Bing and Yahoo!'s paid results, as they have organic search results.