Yahoo! has migrated organic search results to Bing across Europe, as the two firms cement the landmark search alliance deal stuck two years ago.
The move means searches on Yahoo! UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, will generate results powered by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
Paid search adverts, however, will remain as they currently are.
The transition is one that’s already been made in America, including the US, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Australia and New Zealand Yahoo search results are also powered by Bing.
This change does not impact search advertising yet, but website owners may want to reassess their SEO strategy.
In preparation for the switch, Yahoo! has provided advice to achieve the best SEO results:
• Optimise your site for the Bing crawler, as this will ensure that it’s listed in organic search results provided by both Yahoo! and Bing.
• Review whether any changes need to be made to paid search campaigns to ‘compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate’.
• Take your most important keywords and compare the rankings between Yahoo! and Bing, this will give some insight into how traffic and sales may be affected by the transition.
Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster resources and analytics.
To ensure that their web properties are properly referenced and indexed by the Bing algorithm, Yahoo is encouraging all webmasters to start visiting now the Bing Webmaster Tools for more information to help optimise sites for Bing.
The joint Yahoo! and Microsoft teams continue to work together to prepare the sales teams and customers with the necessary information to set them up for success through future paid search transition.
For more information, please visit the blog post entitled ‘Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance: a new milestone for Europe as Yahoo! Search organic search transitions to Bing’ which is live on the Microsoft Advertising community blog.
