Yahoo Organic results powered by Bing from 3rd August in UK
Yahoo has just sent an email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August. This shouldn’t be a big deal for most sites because they have only a few percent market share but it certainly will double the influence that the Bing algorithm has in the UK.
We wanted to let you know that we are now ready to transition Yahoo! organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the Yahoo! search page) to Microsoft. This is an important aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and will help us toward our goal of further improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic results globally.
The organic search transition will begin on August 3rd 2011 for Yahoo! European properties in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
While no action is required on your part for this transition, if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change:
- Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
- Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimise your website for the Bing crawler, to help ensure your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo! and Bing organic search results.
Please note that Yahoo! is NOT transitioning paid search results at this time, and you should continue managing your Yahoo! Search Marketing account as usual. We will provide you with ample notice prior to the paid search transition of your market, to help you prepare for a smooth transition.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 7 comments below, or add your own!
I hope they will come with something new so that we can see some competition in search engines.
I think Bing is definitely on the up in the UK especially with the many people using windows phones as Bing is the default search provider. Yahoo’s best days are clearly behind them, Microsoft should buy them out to have a chance of challenging Google!
Any monopoly either by google or microsoft is destructive and raises the bar against small websites or new websites.
great, I don’t think google is able to provide its users with the best search results..
Its a good move by yahoo and microsoft..
Having just check ranking position for some keywords on Bing UK and Yahoo UK, I’m seeing differing results. I’d have thought that if Bing is now powering Yahoo, SERPs wold be the same on both engines?
I don’t like this. Bing search is hard for seo.
Bing surely can not be compared with Google.
But I hope it could manage to get more share on the market, because I have pretty good positions in Bing’s SERP