As of the 24th of August 2010 yahoo announced it was official that their US and Canada results from their search engine will be coming from Bing and not their Search Engine.
It is understood that this will be rolled out globally and will at some point impact all searches done through yahoo. This is the biggest shake up in the search engine world for a long time.
The impact this will have on SEO and sites on the web is difficult to gauge. Rankings across all 3 search engines can be dramatically different. So those who relied on or got alot of traffic through ranking well in Yahoo will now have this traffic source cut off completely.
In my experience i have seen sites ranking 1 in yahoo but not even noticed by Bing as it seems to be pickier in when it decides to discover a site. To try and get a grasp on how this will affect the world of search engines it’s good to look at how the market share will look like before and after this change in the UK.
Market share of search engines before and after:
- Google: 85.64%
- Bing: 3.55%
- Yahoo! Search UK & Ireland: 2.62%
- Other: 8.19%
After switch:
- Google: 85.64%
- Bing: 6.17%
- Other: 8.19%
Bing has significantly stepped up it’s marketing with lots of tv ads and sponsors popping up everywhere. So this market share could change as more and more people are exposed to Bing.
Not only with advertising but Bing are going for an overhaul in trying to go after the savvy and the advanced user by adding Bing webmaster tools. Allowing insights like this is beneficial because if Bing was to achieve any significant market share. People in the SEO business will be able to target Bing much more affectively.
The fact that this has come quite suddenly in The US and Canada and slow to other countries is very beneficial to us. We can strategise accordingly and try to affectively focus on two search engines instead of the three.
However the importance of this will be known over time because for now Google is still the main and significant target of Internet Marketers as it is where most of the traffic comes from.
About the author:
Posted by Simon.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.