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July 20th, 2010
New Search Alliance Transition Updates and Tips
Important information about the organic and paid search transition, new Yahoo! and Microsoft editorial guidelines, mobile updates and more
As Yahoo! continues to work closely with Microsoft to implement the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we want to call out some important updates and tips to help ensure the best transition experience for you.
Organic search update and tips
A key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search listings (those found on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.
If organic search is important to your business, here are three valuable tips to help make sure you’re prepared:
- Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
- Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
- Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.
For more on the organic search transition, see the FAQ’s for self-service advertisers at the Yahoo! Transition Center.
Organic and paid search testing
Transitioning complex systems with quality requires a lot of testing, and we’re in the process of doing just that. Fortunately, there’s nothing you need to do, though there are a few things you should keep in mind: In mid-July, we began testing the delivery of organic results from Bing to Yahoo! Search, which may gradually increase to up to 25% of Yahoo! Search traffic. We also began testing the delivery of paid search results from Microsoft Advertising adCenter to Yahoo! Search, which began with a small percentage of traffic and may increase to include up to 2.5% to 3.5% of live Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. Please note that testing volumes will fluctuate during this period. Since the traffic percentages are small, advertisers should not draw any conclusions from what they observe during these tests, as the results may not be indicative of the future marketplace with full Yahoo! volume.
New editorial guidelines to take effect in August
There have been numerous questions from advertisers, wondering whether certain types of editorial content—such as gambling and contests—will be permitted once the transition takes place. To that end, Yahoo! and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines that will begin taking effect for both Yahoo! and Microsoft paid search advertisers in early August. It’s best to review them now.
You can do that here.
Mobile update
As part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, Yahoo’s mobile organic and paid search results will soon be powered by Microsoft in the U.S. The transition is expected to coincide with the online organic and paid search timing. And, as with all Yahoo! Search experiences, Yahoo! will continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings. Once this transition is complete, you’ll be able to manage both your Yahoo! Search and Microsoft mobile campaigns from a single platform, adCenter. For more, take a look at the mobile FAQs on the Yahoo! Transition Center.
Transitioning with quality
We know that the holiday season is important to you. It’s important to us. While we’ve made good progress toward our goal of a quality transition for advertisers in the U.S. and Canada this year, as we’ve mentioned before, we may defer this transition until after the 2010 holiday season, if we believe that it will improve the overall experience.
More Alliance info from the Yahoo! Advertising blog
— The Team
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38 Comments Add your own
1. Iván García | July 21st, 2010 at 1:18 am
Good luck with this changes. I wish all the best for this “project”.
2. Barbara | July 29th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
We hope Bing allows online retail stores to verify their website using DNS verification TXT record like Google. Our site is hosted by a 3rd party and this is our only option. Thank you.
3. Adam | July 30th, 2010 at 11:08 am
Looking forward to seeing how YSM and Bing will integrate!
4. James | July 30th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
This is such a shame! Yahoo’s current organic search listings and their ad manager are FAR superior to Bing’s. I can’t believe they are doing this to us. Hopefully Yahoo will at least keep their site explorer website online, as it is an indispensable and one-of a kind tool. For example, compare these links: 37,840,704 Yahoo results and just 4,970 from Google.
Yahoo
Google
5. Lady Gaga Pictures | July 30th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
I am highly upset because our site is number one in Yahoo and on page two of Bing. This change is not what we were looking for. ARGGG!
6. ced | July 30th, 2010 at 5:09 pm
In our market of website template & flash templates, most of visitors are aware of what is going on. Maybe Yahoo & microsoft aliance will help the market to find new customers, specially if visitors have a bit more choice then before.For 8 years of activity, search engine always place the same websites on top search, ingnoring all alternative website. At http://www.myflashxml.com we are working hard to provide innovative products. Hopefully, it will be appreciate in those days of difficult economie.
7. Jon | August 5th, 2010 at 10:15 am
When I do a search I like to have relevant listings to my search, not paid ads clogging up the return on top. For this reason alone I have avoided bing. Did they name it bing for the money? Everyone knows the top 3 listings in a searches return are going to get most of the visitors, and that is why bing puts advertisements in those positions. This appears to be just about money…….. Happy to say I can still GOOGLE!
8. Ice Tbone | August 5th, 2010 at 10:31 am
Looks like we will need to be on our toes to make a good switch.
9. light bulb | August 5th, 2010 at 10:44 am
I can hardly wait for the change. Lets get it going now
10. Josh Boxer | August 5th, 2010 at 11:25 am
Very upset about the transition. Bing is weak for Search advertising and has yielded almost no results where as Yahoo and Google totally rock. MSN has a long way to go.
11. James Victory | August 5th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I’ve been an advertiser since Gore invented the internet and I don’t like changes.
12. Online Service Reviews | August 5th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Never had good results with Adcenter – too expensive and erratic. Also, way too many restrictions – Beware all who use any hint of trademark or content beyond G Rated. Too bad it’s not an Adcenter transition to YSM!
13. Zan | August 5th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Definitely looking forward to this transition. Very tired of Google slaps and what not.
Cheers!
14. Stephen Parkin | August 5th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I hope the change goes well my guitar site is number 1 on Yahoo and only 40 something on Bing. It is number 2 on Google for play classical guitar. I never did understand the differences so I hope you can get it sorted out so there is more consistency.
Thank you.
15. Charles Kaluwasha | August 5th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
I also hope this will be a relief and attractive move to us and stop dancing to the Google dance.
Thanks.
16. Omni Jobs | August 6th, 2010 at 12:05 am
Good luck. I will be glad to see the back of the Yahoo advertising platform which has driven me crazy several times. Hope you close the gap on Google.
17. Dr. Michael Haley | August 6th, 2010 at 2:52 am
At least we will only have to optimize for two search engines instead of 3. I am confident that “Ying” or “Bahoo” will get more traffic in the end making Google less dominant. Certainly something to watch out for. Especiallyif all your eggs are in the Google SEO basket.
18. Pond Algae | August 6th, 2010 at 3:52 am
I wish I shared your optimism Dr. Haley. Even when combined, Google dominates the market and if these two engines use Bing results and the ppc platform, I don’t expect they’ll gain that much ground, and in fact I would suspect they might even lose a little bit.
It might end up being a lift for bing but yahoo is slipping big time.
19. Richard Sexton | August 6th, 2010 at 9:06 am
One bright side for advertisers is the MSN AdCenter Desktop tool. It functions much the same as the Google Adwords Editor, and is much faster than working directly online with the MSN AdCenter. I’d recommend everyone at least give it a try.
I know there are lots of SEO concerns with the integration, but the bottom line is, if you are optimizing correctly for Google, you will still be in a good position for BingHoo.
20. Knightmare | August 6th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
I hope Ding is offering pre-pay now???
21. Michael | August 6th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Another jump for MSN another kick in the head (or wallet) for small business owners.
22. Martin | August 6th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Haven’t been able to log in to Yahoo Search Marketing for MONTHS now – I just get an endless string of:-
“The server at login21.marketingsolutions.yahoo.com is taking too long to respond.”
What’s the only way to contact support on this? Login to YSM to contact us..!!!
Can anyone provide a non-login route to support?
23. larry | August 8th, 2010 at 9:38 am
I’m hoping that this collaboration brings the best of both worlds of MS and yahoo.
Yahoo attracts a certain crowd, and bing attracts a certain crowd, hopefully the cross pollination between the two will provide the synergy to outperform.
24. Max@Arabic Genie | August 14th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
It’s a shame that the Yahoo search algorithms will be thrown out the window. I always valued the differences between bing and yahoo. Let’s hope there’ll be some benefits to websites and advertisers too.
25. Micheal | August 17th, 2010 at 4:23 am
Good luck and have fun with these changes
26. Purity Rings Online | August 17th, 2010 at 8:16 am
I hope this transition is a good thing… I have always ranked higher in Yahoo compared to Bing.
27. Steve | August 17th, 2010 at 8:21 am
I’m on the 1st page of Yahoo and Bing right now. Sure hope this doesn’t hurt my rankings! Google is bad enough…
28. AirBeds | August 17th, 2010 at 8:28 am
For some reason, my site is much more optimized for Bing and Yahoo than it is for Google. I hope this alliance is successful!
29. Internet Consultants | August 17th, 2010 at 9:44 am
Wow!!! Great and we are looking forward for the complete transition and alliance…
30. Harry E. Hough | August 17th, 2010 at 10:19 am
We are very concerned about the change, about how much more work this will cause us, how much better or worse the results will be, and the total cost to us. We very much doubt we will see any improvement or benefit to us.
31. Gary Schafer | August 17th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Search Engine Optimization for the faint of heart, it’s not. It is not that most of us haven’t been waiting for freaking ever to be able to list a new dog that was born yesterday and not five years ago. Let’s see about relevance now.When listings are outdated or outmoded they should move out and for quite a few years now, they have not. Is it impossible to hope for relevance that appears both on PP C as well as organic search?
32. Mark P. | August 17th, 2010 at 6:39 pm
I recently tried using Bing for a search and didn’t get relevant results. I was searching for Chinese language schools in Hangzhou and found several schools on the first page of Google but the first page of Bing didn’t give me any. I hope they can improve and provide relevant results in the future.
33. Keir A | August 17th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
We have been preparing our websites for this chang for some time now. Hope it works out for everyone.
From a user standpoint I’m not a fan of the current bing results when I’m looking for something. IF this doesn’t make the search engine better and faster I don’t understand the point other than eliminating one of the big three. It may oprn up a spot for a new competitor
34. Cyber Monday Deals | August 17th, 2010 at 10:42 pm
Great and we are looking forward for the complete transition and alliance…
35. Black Friday Deals | August 17th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Good luck and have fun with these changes
36. John | August 18th, 2010 at 8:55 am
So far I’ve been less than impressed with the Bing search results, nothing but total garbage. Sad to see quality search results vanish from Yahoo. This will surely drive more market share to Google.
37. Jeannie | August 19th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I’ve noticed 3 of my sites dropped considerably (as in several pages) in the last couple of days on Yahoo. I certainly hope it will re-adjust itself soon. I’ve seen a large drop in traffic as a result.
38. yoo sang cho | August 24th, 2010 at 9:18 am
i want keep going web searching ads.but very hard to understanding computer.i think credit card expire.but another credit card had.please call 972-243-4707call to joe.i will give you another credit card number.
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