subject: Will The Yahoo/bing Merger Affect Search Engine Optimization In Pa [print this page] When Yahoo and Bing merge in August or September of this year, the Bing search engine will be powering 30% of all search results in the U.S., and companies that rely on either organic or paid search from Yahoo! should be prepared for the change. Yahoo! has started its integration testing with Bing, and the actual transition to Bing organic search results is set to take place in August and September, with the PPC transition scheduled for October. If there are any problems, the companies will wait until after the December shopping season to complete the merger so that online retailers will not be impacted. The Yahoo! home page will still show mail, news and other applications as it does now, only the paid and natural search results will be powered by Bing.
You can view a presentation from Yahoo! on the Yahoo!/Bing search alliance here.
In addition to this change, the Bing search bot will also change on October 1, 2010.Right now Bing works with MSNbot 2.0, and Bingbot, a brand new engine currently in test status, will replace this.
What will this mean for search engine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA)? You may need to check your robots.txt file to make sure the bot exclusions are set correctly after the rollout in October, but Bing has stated that if there is no directive for Bingbot, then it will continue to follow the directive set for MSNbot, so you dont have change anything. If you have directives in your robots.txt file for both bots, make sure they are the same because in that case Bingbot will ignore directives for MSNbot.
Both Google and Bing search engines value quality links and original, keyword-rich content from cleanly coded sites. There are some differences in the Google and Bing user interfaces but the following guidelines for good search engine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA) should still apply:
Make sure any old pages redirect permanently to current pages
Validate HTML and remove any broken links
Check to make sure your content is unique, and continually update your website content
Make sure all your text (keywords) is visible
Create smaller pages which link together and focus on only one topic
Use text navigation (with keywords in text links) not images
Add both an XML and HTML sitemap
Make sure your website is set up on Bing Webmaster Tools and there are no errors
Take a look at the Bing Cashback comparison shopping engine if you have an ecommerce site.
In addition make sure that links to your site are not paid or from link farms.
