SEOs targeting Yahoo should prepare to see some changes in how the engine ranks websites over the next month, as the company has informed advertisers that it is to begin testing the Bing algorithm in live search results.
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land reports that an email sent to Yahoo!’s search engine marketing clients has confirmed for the first time that Bing-powered results will move from offline-testing to the live SERPs seen by real-life web users. For the first time since the “Search Alliance” was confirmed, both PPC adverts and organic search results on Yahoo Search will be conducted by Microsoft’s Bing technology rather than the long-standing Yahoo algorithms.
According to Yahoo, testing volumes will fluctuate throughout this month for both paid and organic search results. However to ensure that PPC campaigns are not disrupted by lack of optimisation for the Microsoft AdCentre platform, Yahoo assures advertisers that paid seach volume will be “kept low enough to help minimise any potential impact to your account.”
The email also states that, assuming the testing continues as it currently stands, Yahoo! anticipates that organic search results will be powered by Bing sometime in August or September.
In the email Yahoo also plays up to some of the speculation that has been seen in the SEO community regarding the Bing merger. It recommends that users review the Bing Webmaster Tools and implement search engine optimisation strategies for the Bing crawler, “as Bing results will be displayed for approximately 30% of overall search query market share after this change.”
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