Yahoo! Search Powered by Bing in the US and Canada
August 24th, 2010 | Link-Assistant.Com | Posted in category Bing SEO Search Engine Optimization Search News Yahoo! SEO
Last week Yahoo! fully switched to using Bing's technology to power its search results in the US and Canada.
Basically what this means is whenever you run a search on yahoo.com you get exactly the same results as on Bing. The only things different are the navigation, some universal results (except images and videos) and related searches.
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The organic search results are completely identical and if you look at the links in the footer of Yahoo! results page you'll see a 'powered by Bing' sign.
So far it looks like everything is going as planned by the Search Alliance team of Yahoo and Microsoft, so unless something goes wrong we should expect Yahoo to switch to Bing powered PPC ads by mid October.
We've already discussed the possible implications of this merger, so we won't be going there again. The main point is that Bing is now powering 5.2 billion searches monthly which gives it around 31.6% of the search market share in the US and 8.6% in Canada (according to comScore report from June 2010).
This said you might want to check your Bing/Yahoo rankings to see how you're doing there and optimize your site for Bing to tap into those 5.2 billion searches.
The Fate of Yahoo Site Explorer
One thing that concerns search marketers most is the fate of Yahoo's Site Explorer tool which is one of the best free sources of backlink data. If Site Explorer goes away it will take many of the popular backlink checkers relying solely on its data with it.
Good news everyone! According to the post on the official Yahoo search blog Site Explorer will remain operational at least till early 2012 (that's when Yahoo is planning to complete the switch to Microsoft's backend technology globally).
"Once all markets are being served by Microsoft, we plan to refine the focus of Yahoo! Site Explorer, and webmasters should use Bing’s Webmaster Center to provide information about their website and its structure."
It's really hard to tell for sure what they mean by 'refining the focus', let's hope it's not a diplomatic way of saying 'we'll shut it down'.
There's no need to worry if you're using SEO SpyGlass though. Even if Microsoft and Yahoo do pull the plug on Site Explorer you will still have plenty of backlink sources at your disposal. Although SEO SpyGlass does rely on Yahoo for backlink data, it's just one of the many sources we use.
We just ran some tests here and the results are quite reassuring. Using just 11 US search engines (no Yahoo!) out of over 400 supported, SEO SpyGlass finds about 3 to 7 times as many links as when using Yahoo! alone. About 50-70% of backlinks found through Yahoo! are also found using the set of US search engines. Thus if Site Explorer is shut down we'll only lose access to about 30-50% of backlinks from Yahoo's database which is just about 300-500 backlinks per project.
So without Site Explorer SEO SpyGlass will be gathering only 4-10% less backlinks. As we're constantly adding new backlink sources we should close this gap before Site Explorer is shut (should it happen) anyway.
How's is the switch to Bing algo affecting your site? Are you noticing a rise/decline in traffic from Bing or Yahoo? Share your story in the comments.
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