The Bing/Yahoo search alliance is gaining pace and is expected to become an even greater influence on search in the UK later this year. If your website has been optimised solely for Google you could miss out. Yahoo will integrate Microsoft’s mobile, organic and paid listings in north America this Summer and anticipates that its search will be fully powered by Microsoft in August or September. Subject to the success of this, further integration will be rolled out globally.
Even now, some businesses claim to see better results from Bing searches than they do from Google and when Yahoo has fully incorporated Bing for search, Bing’s share of the market will grow dramatically. Particularly as it also powers the search in Facebook which has more than 300 million active users, 50% of whom are logged on in any given day. What’s more Bing is now offered as a default search engine on the new iPhone operating system.
From the webmaster point of view your site should use Bing Webmaster Tools and you should submit an xml sitemap to Bing. Webzeppelin provides this as a free service for all websites that we build. A new Bingbot has been developed to crawl sites and it will replace the existing msnbot in October. So ensuring that your site is optimised for Bing is essential.
If you want to increase site traffic (and who doesn’t) there is no question that Bing/Yahoo should now be include in the search optimisation strategy of your website.