Bing to Power Yahoo Search

With the search engine and search advertising partnership in the works between Yahoo! and Microsoft, how much will your website have to adapt to a growing number of users trying to find you on something other than Google? Yahoo will soon incorporate Microsoft’s Bing technology as its default search engine, giving the pair almost 30% market share in US searches versus Google’s 65%.

So what does this mean for the effort you’ve put into making sure your creative web design stays on top of the search results? With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, it is going to be important for webmasters to be aware of the importance of Bing in the future. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo! are going to have to make sure they pay attention to their Bing results now. Once the switch comes next year, your Yahoo Search results aren’t going to matter as much as your Bing ones.

The differences between ranking well in Google and in Bing are luckily not too far apart, but there are a few things that Bing holds more important. Domain age seems to play a stronger role in the search results for Bing, as well as the amount of text on your website. Unlike Google however, blogs linked to your website aren’t quite as important as on Google.

For all the concern over rankings out there and how to optimize for different search engines, it is important to remember that there are other aspects of bringing your company business through your website. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have been growing fast in the business world, and your company can draw in many visitors from these sites alone, without worrying about those people finding you on a search engine.