Many of our clients have been asking us about when Bing results will be visible on Yahoo. As of a few weeks ago, Yahoo has been testing Bing results for quality so periodically the user will be getting listings from Bing (based on MSN Live Search) instead of Yahoo’s in-house search engine. A recent article indicated that up to 25% or results on Yahoo come from Bing, so for people who get high volume traffic either from Bing or Yahoo, there can be a visible change in traffic from these engines.
Websites that have gotten better results on Bing (than Yahoo) historically are now noticing increased “Yahoo” traffic. Conversely, people who do poorly on Bing but well on Yahoo will notice an opposite effect. One of the key problems in preparing for Bing’s complete takeover of Yahoo search results is that Bing and Google have very similar ranking factors. Ordinarily, not much attention has been paid to Bing in search because it had the #3 share in the search market and hovered in the 10% range while Google still gets around 65% of the search engine market share. By adding Yahoo, this will make Bing a more important goal for SEO, but the problem with Bing SEO is that it is tougher to pin down despite its similarity to Google. We have seen cases where people have done very well in Google and Yahoo, but poorly in Bing, and the bulk of all major SEO companies will still be biased toward Google due to its market share. We have also seen quite a few cases where clients get great results in Bing and Google but suffer in Yahoo, so these customers will be the primary beneficiaries of the change.
What should you consider for Bing? First, you should look to your Google rankings. If you are doing well in Google, you should ask yourself how much you want to risk by making changes for what is still going to be the secondary combined presence in search. If you are not doing well in Google then this is an added reason to take more action. Overall, Bing uses link popularity and page content in the same way that Google does, but does not appear to filter links for quality in the same way. Therefore, low-quality links can do more for Bing results, but will either have a neutral or negative effect on Google rankings. Bing also appears to give more credit to keywords in URLs and domain names, and still has a certain preference for fresh content similar to MSN/Live search. Adding some new pages with a good descriptive URL structure may be one way to get more rankings on Bing, and as long as those pages are themed correctly, they will likely help in Google as well.
