What the Yahoo/Microsoft Deal Means for Your Site
Microsoft and Yahoo have been doing the partnership dance for a while now. It was almost 18 months ago that it looked to all the world like Microsoft was going to just buy Yahoo. Of course, Yahoo didn’t go for the deal and their stock tanked and we’ve been in a three-way race ever since. Yahoo has sputtered along without doing much new. They released Yahoo Buzz, but it doesn’t seem to have generated nearly the “buzz” that they had likely hoped. Microsoft on the other hand has release Bing, which has generated lots of noise and put Microsoft back on the search map.
Now a new deal is supposed to be announced that will make Bing the default search engine on Yahoo. This is not the first time Yahoo has changed engines. At first, they had their own search, which just searched their directory (remember their directory? no?). A little later, they partnered with and eventually bought Alta Vista. Then they partnered with Google for a while. After it became clear that Google was kicking their butt, they partnered with and eventually bought Inktomi. And now they are looking to partner with Microsoft. You can’t say Yahoo isn’t trying to do well at search. The problem is they always seem to look outside the company for answers.
Okay, enough history. What does this mean for you and your web site? Well, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that this will make SEO much easier in the long run. Instead of having three engines to optimize for, you only have two. A big win if you spend much time on SEO. Things that make Yahoo happy may not please Google. Stuff that both of them like might not go over well with Bing. Yada yada yada. No fun. And dropping to two instead of three is not just a small improvement. Right now any change to your site might please or displease three different search engines. That’s eight different outcomes! Drop down to two engines and you only have four different outcomes. This alone makes it much easier to determine if a given change to your site was positive or negative.
Also, right now it is always hard to decide if you should spend any time on Bing or Yahoo, given Google’s dominant market share. Put Yahoo and Bing together, however, and you have something that is clearly worth pursuing. Anything that simplifies this sort of decision-making is welcome.
Now for the bad news and there are a several points here.
First, if you are currently ranking well in Yahoo, but not in Bing, you’re hosed. Sorry. All that work for Yahoo is down the drain, since their engine is being put out to pasture. Conversely, if you are ranking well in Bing, you’ll get exposure on Yahoo as well. It cuts both ways.
Second, nobody really knows what Bing wants. Microsoft might not even know what Bing wants. It is simply too new and there is too much tuning still to be done on their end. In the meantime, we have to try to tease out the rhyme and reason behind Bing’s results. With the Yahoo traffic as well, Bing is too big to ignore and too new to understand. So, it is time to go back to SEO school to some extent. Read a lot and experiment a lot and together we will crack this nut, but we aren’t there yet.
Third, there is now less competition in search. Less competition is rarely a good thing, although it might be okay here since it means some real competition for Google. The real concern here has to do with the spammers and black hatters. On the one hand, with fewer traffic sources, successful spammers could cause even more harm than they do today. On the other hand, with fewer engines out there, there may be fewer loop holes for them to exploit, which could lead to fewer spammers. That said, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
As a side note, it would be easy to complain that this deal gives Microsoft more power over the Internet and that this is bad. Microsoft has a miserable record of doing well with Internet standards (see CSS, HTML, and Javascript in most versions of IE or see how HotMail still routinely drops messages into the bit bucket rather than send a bounce) and they also have a history of pushing their own technologies (Activex, JScript, and Silverlight pop to mind). All that said, the above point about giving Google some actual competition remains valid. Even the haters should be able to see that Microsoft may be the only company able to provide that competition.
To sum up, SEO will get easier because we’ll have fewer targets to hit and we know both are worth going after. On the other hand, your Yahoo rankings are being flushed and it is too early to be really sure how to optimize for Bing. A trade off to be sure, but I suspect it will be a win for us in the long run.
> First, if you are currently ranking well in Yahoo, but not in Bing, you’re hosed. Sorry. All that work for Yahoo is down the drain, since their engine is being put out to pasture.
How do you figure?
“Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms” (MS press release)