Yahoo and Microsoft have finally announced their search deal, after years of negotiation. In short, if the deal is approved by
regulators, Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft Bing and Yahoo
Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft adCenter.
This will not happen right away, best case the deal will be complete in early 2010, the longest it can
take for full implementation is two years. The integration will begin
in the United States with search and then with search ads. The
integration will then expand to other countries and regions.
The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it
will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by
Bing." Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval,
and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the
integration. So you have time to prepare your site.
BACKGROUND ON DEAL
* The term of the agreement is 10 years
* Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s
core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to
integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search
platforms
* Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
* Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid
search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its
technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing
display advertising technology.
* Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
* Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales
force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve
advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s
AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be
set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Optimizing for BING will become more important
Since Bing will be the one powering the search results and now having a bigger share of the search market, it will make sense to make sure your pages are well ranked with Bing. I will certainly be doing more work to provide insight into how Bing
ranks results and where it differs substantively from Google. A nice tool to see how Google and Bing results differ is available at the Bing vs. Google search tool.
Yahoo and Bing LOCAL will become more important
In general Local SEO is becoming more important but with Bing serving up local listings
in the search results (as they do now), Bing's local registration is
going to become very important for local businesses and law firms. Check out Bing Local and their local listing center.
This overall deal seems to be better for Microsoft then Yahoo, Yahoo seems to just be quitting the search engine game and just leaving it up to Microsoft and Bing. I will say that BING has proven to be a very good search tool for me and they seem to be serious about competing here, we will see what happens but remember its still possibly 2 years away before this actually goes into place.