Posts tagged Yahoo
Bing/Yahoo Organic Results Transition Complete
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WebProNews posted a short piece concerning the facts behind the long-rumored Bing and Yahoo! search results merger, and we’re here to summarize it for you.
Bing announced in 2010 that it had begun transitioning Bing results into Yahoo! results which is a byproduct of the merger between Microsoft and Yahoo corporations. As of now, the merger of both US and Canadian results is complete and users can expect to find merged SERPs in the instances of content, images, and video on both desktop and mobile browsers.
Shasi Seth, Yahoo’s VP of Search Products says, “”With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.”
Both companies express a deep desire to get all advertising formats transitioned quickly and at the least inconvenience for consumers and advertisers. The transitions on all formats is now complete, and users should expect to see a full Bing/Yahoo transition as of now.
Summary provided by Heather Hendrick
Microsoft Search Results now being shown by Yahoo
Back in 2010, WebProNews started reporting on the Yahoo and Microsoft merger and how that affected search results. At that time, up to 25% of results shown on Yahoo were coming from Microsoft and up to 3.5% of paid ads were coming from Microsoft’s ad network.
Yahoo’s VP of search stated, “The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft, however, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing.”
For SEO, Microsoft’s team provides the following helpful hints:
- Keep comparing rankings in Yahoo and Bing to find out which keywords make the most sense for you to pursue
- Modify your paid search campaigns based on what you forsee changing in the organic sphere
- Get invested in Bing webmaster tools as Microsoft software will be responsible for reporting going forward
It was also a good time to check and see that crawl policies concerning Yahoobots as well as Bingbots were congruent, and users should have noticed a spike in Bing bot visits after the merge.
Bing Webmaster Tools had been completely redesigned for the merge and had a bunch of new features and tools that many SEOs might find useful. As summarized by a Bing spokesman:
“The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.”
The good news is, a lot of businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, so with the merge and increased Bing market share, many SEOs could see a bump in traffic. The announcement was followed with the news that by September of 2010, users should expect that one hundred percent of all Bing and Yahoo results will be powered by Microsoft. The time for Bing optimization is now.
Heather Hendrick, writer
Yahoo – Where Does It Fit Into Your Search Strategy?
In search, a lot of what Yahoo has done has been overshadowed by what Google and Bing have done, simply because Google controls such a huge piece of the search pie, and Bing is still a relatively fresh entity. All eyes are still on Bing as it grows. That leaves Yahoo somewhere in the middle, where it technically sits in terms of market share.
Yahoo has done quite a bit over the past six months, and has a lot more going on in the coming ones. Regardless of whether or not Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft finally goes through, and Bing takes over the algorithm side of things, Yahoo is still very much focused on search.
“Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future,” says Yahoo’s new senior VP of search products, Shashi Seth. “We’ll continue to drive innovation. It’s our stake in the ground.”
According to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Yahoo’s market share in the U.S. declined by 2 percentage points from December to January as Bing and even Ask grew by 5% and 4% respectively. Regardless of this data, there are still plenty of people using Yahoo, and that means businesses shouldn’t ignore it. In fact, businesses should do all they can to understand the audience they are reaching with each individual search engine.
An interesting study from Wunderman, ZAAZ, and Compete suggests that the demographic and psychographic profile of each loyal search engine user is different. Bing users, for example, tend to be mostly from the tip of the adoption curve (innovators and early adopters) where Yahoo and Google’s passengers tend to be middle majority, according to the report from these firms.
The point is that it is easy to get wrapped up in specific search engines, but Yahoo is still a key player and it is worth paying attention to all of the things they are doing to improve their own users’ experience, because you might find specific ways to reach Yahoo users that might be slightly different than ways you might try to reach Google users (or Bing’s users).
What Yahoo Has Done Lately
In September, Yahoo launched a completely new version of Yahoo Search. In addition to being faster, this new version included things like:
- SearchMonkdey structured data, which lends to richer results from an increasing number of sites
- Search Scan and Safe Search, which help protect users from viruses, spyware and spam
- Search Pad, which lets users take notes for research as they search
- Query assistance, which has been extended in the left-hand column to let users browse concepts related to their queries
- Image and video search refiners
Yahoo has expanded its coverage for enhanced results to formats like video, documents, games, products, local businesses, events, discussions, and news. In November, Yahoo extended its Search Assist features from the web search box to the search box on every Yahoo property. They also began including photos, videos, and tweets about news stories in search results.
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Yahoo! Search Highlights at SearchSpeak @ Yahoo! Video |
“We’re focused on making it easier to search for local businesses,” says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search. “Starting in December 2009, we display more Yahoo! local business shortcuts when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. We also began providing new functionality directly within the local shortcut to refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. This further enhances an already great shortcut that provides more of the information you care about most directly on the search results page; including ratings, reviews, photos, and directions.” (emphasis added)
In December, Yahoo started integrating tweets in the form of a shortcut from search results pages (separate from the news tweets) when users search for “buzzy” topics. Finally, Yahoo added more entertainment refiners within its image/video search products.
What Yahoo Will Be Doing
One new innovation that Yahoo unveiled this week is called “Sketch-a-Search”. It’s a mobile app that lets users pull up a map and user their fingers to search by tracing a line around the area they want to search. An image of it can be seen here.
As far as advertising, Yahoo says it’s focused on three key areas: better value, transparency and control, and innovation. The company says it is making pricing adjustments, and will allow advertisers to pay different rates for different traffic sources across Yahoo’s network. The company said it knows most people focus most of their campaign son Google, and they’ve created an import campaign tool and a new desktop tool for Yahoo Search Marketing, which will be available next month. They are putting ads into Search Assist, and they’re doing re-targeting of ads based on users’ search history.
Will Bing Powering Yahoo Make SEO Easier?
There is an interesting discussion going on in our WebProWorld forum about search engine optimization post Microsoft-Yahoo deal. For those unfamiliar with the topic, Microsoft and Yahoo recently gained regulatory approval on a search and advertising deal announced last year, which will see Yahoo using Bing’s algorithm in its search results. The discussion is about whether or not this means businesses and webmasters will only have to worry about optimizing for 2 search engines (Google/Bing) rather than 3 (Google, Yahoo, and Bing).
Will you focus your efforts more heavily on Bing? Discuss.
What Bing Coming to Yahoo Means
It’s important to note that Microsoft and Yahoo still have plenty of details to work out before anyone knows just how the product of this deal will function. We know that Bing will be used in the back-end of searches on Yahoo, but we don’t know what other elements Yahoo will still be incorporating into the search experience. For example, Yahoo said last week that the companies will still be discussing how SearchMonkey and BOSS figure into the mix.
Optimizing for Yahoo is not going to be limited to showing up in Bing’s results. That’s not to say that showing up in Bing’s results won’t have its advantages for Yahoo search, but there is a lot more going on at Yahoo than that. The company has been stressing that it is still very much focused on search, and under the deal with Microsoft, Yahoo will still be controlling the user experience at Yahoo.com.
Right now, Yahoo.com has plenty of elements to consider, from news and trending topics, to a whole slew of “applications” that users can customize on their Yahoo homepage. Among these are Facebook and Flickr. If you want to get in front of Yahoo users, it’s not limited to Yahoo search results. That said, Yahoo search results also have their own thing going on. Keep an eye on the box that appears under the search box after you enter a query. It contains related queries, and “related concepts”. This is one area that could conceivably be independent from Bing (although that remains to be seen at this point). Yahoo is not shy about putting brands in these “related concepts” either. You can find WebProNews in there for a query like “ebusiness news”.
The point is, Yahoo has made it clear that it will continue to control the user experience, and that means there should be plenty of areas within Yahoo that are out of Bing’s control. This leads me to presume that Yahoo will not be something you’ll want to ignore, just because Bing is integrated into it. Remember that at this point, Yahoo controls a much greater percentage of the search market than Bing.
All of that said, you may want to pay closer attention to your Bing rankings if you haven’t done so in the past, because while Yahoo will still be Yahoo to its users, the deal also means there will be significantly more eyeballs on what Bing determines to be the most relevant results to searches.
Why Stop at Google, Yahoo, and Bing?
These may be the biggest three search engines in terms of market share in the United States, but there are still plenty of people using others. For one thing, YouTube is number 2. Not Yahoo or Bing. If you are concerned about simply being found where people are searching, you should have a YouTube presence. That of course means having a video strategy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a huge video budget.
There are still people using Ask as well. In search industry coverage, it often gets overshadowed by the others, but there are still a lot of people using it. In fact, the Ask Network’s market share grew by 6% from December to January. Ask.com’s market share grew by 1%. A lot of people search with AOL. AOL’s search is powered by Google, but it doesn’t always return the same results as Google.
Facebook’s search market share grew by 13% in that same period of time. You may not think about Facebook for search as much, but people are spending more and more time on Facebook, and it stands to reason that they’ll be conducting more and more searches from Facebook. Granted, Facebook’s web search feature is powered by Bing, but that’s only a piece of the Facebook Search puzzle. If you don’t have a Facebook strategy, you may be missing out on a lot more searches. By the way, did you know that Facebook recently passed Yahoo as the 2nd most visited site (just under Google)?
These are just a few examples. People are searching from a lot more places. Rather than just optimizing for Google, Yahoo, and Bing, perhaps you should think about all of the places where your site/business would make sense when a user searches (consider niche sites as well).
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