How will the Bing/Yahoo Merger affect your SEO?

Everyone by now is probably aware of the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that has littered the headlines this summer.  Well in case you aren’t then let me elaborate. Bing is to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically Bing will be handling the back-end, while Yahoo will be handling the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. All this should be happening next year sometime. So the next question is, “How will this affect my SEO?”

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, SEO’s and webmasters alike are going to need to evaluate their sites in regards to optimizing for Bing. Optimizing for Bing should be a standard for search engine optimization companies, seeing that they are still one of the “big 3”, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give pay close attention to this.

The word on the web is that it doesn't matter if you rank well in Yahoo now (at least it won't matter when the change comes), if you don't rank well in Bing you may see a decrease in rankings. If you're ranked in position 1 for your keywords in Yahoo, but you're on the 8th page in Bing then you've got some work to do.

There are some differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft's stance on SEO isn't all that different than Google's. There are different algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you've optimized for MSN in the past, you will be glad to know that Bing is not that different.

According to Microsoft’s Bing white paper for webmasters "There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBot."

Do yourself a favor and read that white paper and you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. You may even want to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.