As I mentioned in my previous post (Yahoo & Microsoft Search Alliance), the alliance is well on its way. Some Bing results have already started to show up on Yahoo particularly in US. As a result of the testing, some sites have seen fluctuations on their rankings.
The search alliance also impacts organic search (web, image and video). Microsoft will be responsible for the platform serving organic search used by both companies (Yahoo & Microsoft).
It is possible that the current ranking of your site on Yahoo changes when Yahoo’s organic search results are powered by Bing. Once the transition occurs, your ranking will be largely based on how Bing indexes and ranks your website for a particular search query. Though there might be some adjustments on the way, the current Bing search results are a good indicator of how your site may rank on Yahoo! after the transition.
Comparing your organic keyword rankings on Yahoo and Bing will help you gauge the possibility of rise or drop in your organic traffic after the transition is fully in place. If rankings are doing better in Bing than in Yahoo, then there should be a rise in traffic and lower if your ranking is currently doing better in Yahoo.
Bing’s crawler is scheduled to come out of beta in October and will be re-branded as bingbot replacing msnbot. Bingbot will still honor directives the same way msnbot does. Nevertheless, the main objective of this move is to improve crawling efficiency and increase the number of documents being crawled by Bing.
Given the fact that moving forward the combined traffic of Yahoo and Bing will account for almost 30% of the search market share, SEO consultants cannot ignore Bing as a rounding error anymore. SEO specialists need to pay more attention to how their sites rank on Bing and take the necessary actions to ensure they improve their visibility. Some of the actions that can be taken are:
Create XML sitemaps for your web properties and submit through your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
Expand your link building campaigns for your important pages in your web properties. Make sure you create link baits to get more deep links.
SEO for Bing, in most part, works with Google SEO best practices. Nevertheless, in the next few months, Bing Webmaster Tools will be web marketers best friend. They need to create their webmaster account with Microsoft if not already in place, submit XML sitemaps, run diagnostics and examine performance indicators.
You might need to adjust your pay per click campaigns so that you deal with the traffic shift. In another post I will cover the impact of the merger of Microsoft and Yahoo search results on PPC campaigns.
With the ever growing popularity of twitter and its role in providing real time news that search engines were not traditionally able to provide, Google decided to strike a deal with twitter and include real time search results on their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Real time search is the new addition to the Google Universal search which can potentially impact the face of web marketing and SEO. The real time results take up a significant portion of SERPs and can potentially push down your organic rankings below the first fold. This shows the importance of taking real time search seriously and join the micro blogging stream.
Currently real time searches seem to show mostly for hot trends and event related searches. However, we have to see how this will trend moving forward.
Even though twitter is the application that is most known for providing real time search, there are many other applications that provide micro blogging and RT search including but not limited to facebook, friendfeed, and Orkut which could join the fleet of real time search.
Social Media Consultant
Time flies…June is around the corner and so is Toronto SES 2009. It is as if it was just yesterday, I attended SMX Search Analytics Toronto and exhibited at Toronto Search Engine Strategies Conference back in 2008.
We will be again exhibiting at 2009 SES event which will be held at Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel. This year’s SES conferences will be held on June 8th and June 9th. In addition, on June 10th, there will be some
SEM and
SEO training programs (more on
SEM SEO Training).
I am so excited about this year’s SES conference. At a time of recession, more and more marketers are concerned about their marketing dollars. Search Engine Strategies is a great opportunity for marketers to learn more about the power of
Search Engine Marketing and
Search Engine Optimization.
If search marketing campaigns are executed properly they can prove to be one of the most effective channels for marketers.
I will post more updates on the 2009 SES Toronto.
Google announced earlier that by enhancing Google Profiles they give people a greater control over their online profiles when somebody searches for their names on search engines. Google has already started showing Google profile results at the bottom of US search queries for people names.
Currently only 4 profiles are shown for name-query searches. These results provide snippets from user-generated Google profiles and link to the profile pages. From your Google profile you can link to your blog, LinkedIn profile, or Twitter account. Currently the links are not using nofollow. However, that might change as spammers might start building bogus accounts just for the sake of link building.
By providing links to your other sites from your Google Profile, you can help Google better build a Social Graph of you on the Internet. Google can potentially use this data to better understand the relationship between sites, decide how to flow PageRank, and further personalize search results.
As Google Profiles evolves, Google will add more functionality to the product which will provide Google with more insight into people`s social connections.
Even the Google Profiles are currently shown at the bottom of the SERPs, they could potentially rank on top of the search engine results pages which could potentially divert the traffic from major social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter providing Google with more real estate/platform for socio-demographic advertising.
Nima Asrar Haghighi, SMO Expert
