For those of you with a good memory and those that follow uber geek news you may recall an agreement about a year ago where the Microsoft Bing search engine would start powering the Yahoo search results.
The driver behind the agreement is to release the burden of Yahoo competing head to head with Google in search technology, allowing them to focus on what they do best; providing a content portal and selling ads. From Microsoft’s standpoint they are committed to making the investment in search technology and this provides another source of revenue and traffic for them. I see this as a win-win for both companies and webmasters alike, who have one less search engine to worry about.
More recently there has been an announcement of layoffs of Yahoo! Search staff which leads us to speculate the transition to Bing search results is imminent.
Most webmasters heavily rely on Google traffic and rarely even consider the optimization effort for other search engines. This has been a fine strategy but if you are not thinking about this transition you may wake up to a decrease in search traffic. Another point of interest is that Bing has been gaining market share and may become increasingly relevant.
Here is a breakdown of market share:
Google Sites 63.70%Yahoo! Sites 18.30%Microsoft Sites 12.10%For WhyDoWork here is a breakdown of our search traffic:
Google 91.28%Yahoo 4.14%Bing 1.69%Other 6.27%Now in theory you may assume that after the switch we will see 5.83% bing traffic but this is not necessarily the case. If we rank poorly in Bing relatively to our competitors we will see a decrease in search traffic after the switch. If we rank better relatively to our competitors in Bing we will see an increase.
Truthfully the answer is that the same techniques used in determining your Google ranking is conceptually the same as what determines your Bing ranking [backlinks, keyword optimization, meta tags, title tags, url keywords, etc]. If you would like to read about this theory here is a detailed analysis from SEOMoz, the webs authority in SEO.
Not really. While your conceptual website design and SEO techniques should be the same there are things you can do above and beyond. A great technique is to run search query tests for main keywords and deep links for search terms you expect to rank well for. See where you rank and analyse the people who are higher in the rankings then you. What are they doing different?
The Open Site Explorer is my favorite tool for this type of investigation. Check out your competitors backlinks vs your own. Maybe it will give you some tips.
Good Luck!
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