As you're probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime. Are you ready for Yahoo's switch to Bing? Share your thoughts.

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, webmasters are going to need to evaluate their need to address their own sites with regards to optimizing for Bing. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give this some special attention.

Presumably, it doesn't matter if you rank well in Yahoo now, if you don't rank well in Bing. At least it won't matter when the change comes. If you're ranked number 1 in Yahoo, but you're on the 7th page in Bing, you've got some work to do.

iCrossing Search Strategist David Shapiro gave some good advice in a recent blog post. To summarize, he said if Yahoo is driving a significant amount of traffic to your site, you need to determine what keywords you rank well for in Yahoo, but not in Bing, and before next year, you need to work on raising these rankings. He also said you need to determine which Yahoo terms you rank 6-10 for that may return "Quick Tabs".

"With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable," says Shapiro. "Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select."

"If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better," he adds.

There are differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft's stance on SEO isn't all that different than Google's. There are different algorithms at play, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you've optimized for Live Search in the past, you should be happy to know that Bing's not that different from that either.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper (pdf) for webmasters. "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. As Shapiro says, you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. He also suggests that in some cases, it may be a good idea to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.

There is a good chance you are getting a lot more traffic from Google than from Yahoo, so if that's the case, luckily you still have that going for you. In addition, social networks like Twitter and Facebook (not to mention blogs) are driving a lot of traffic to websites as well.

From: http://www.forum.chotoan.com/don-039-t-los...ing-for-bing714

hi clickkt,

Excellent information. Congratulations for its post!

Best Regards,

ernanind

Link is broken at the moment.. however I can tell you from current experience that Yahoo behaves more like Google than Bing, at least for now. Google is really trying hard to get semantics, taxonomy and categorization about your posts and pages, according to link anchor text, your own titles and such ( I got powerful pages that ranked top over 20 millions competitors in standard serps categorized as BLOGS and moved in google blog search, just because I used the blog function in the cms to make them - quite boring). Yahoo behaves like Google dumber clone, we may say - big importance to links but unable / unwilling to taxonomize.

On the other hand Bing is very different - some differences: its index size is much smaller (at least the one showing in serps) than Google's. For example Google shows 1 billion pages for site:wordpress.com, while Bing.com just some millions. Still Bing crawls aggressively and big time, so this suggests that Bing drops alot of sites or pages seen as bad quality and retains / values only some with high quality for its standards. Likewise, to rank well on Bing you must get links that aren't seen as spam from places it doesn't consider trash. My perception is that it focuses on quality over quantity according to its own standards, and I think page authority, age and contents play a big role there.

I got finally 40 images indexed in Bing from the same sites in which, in 2 months of work, Google indexed over 1,5 millions.. this says something. Anyway in the end it picked up and hopefully it will index alot too.

Very good post I'm glad I haven't done a lot of work with yahoo yet been focusing on google and bing - yeye me for once going in the right direction Have to say where as google's system made senses right from the start I found with bing I was guessing a little seems a lot less user-friendly then again if SEo was was spoon feed everyone would have top 3 ranks on there junk or you would pay big$ for that keyword you wont.