Yahoo! and Bing take first steps towards integration of the search alliance in the UK

Yahoo! have let their advertisers know that from 3rd August 2011, in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, their natural search results will be powered by Bing (Microsoft). The much anticipated paid search transition is still in planning, so for now paid search marketers are still maintaining and managing search campaigns through three platforms.

This is the first step towards the integration of the search alliance for us in the UK, and is something that website owners should be watching carefully through their web analytics. Natural traffic from Yahoo will change as the engines do have different search algorithms, but what we need to be aware of as site owners and marketers is where we need to focus our optimisation activities.

The traffic you’re getting from Yahoo may be for entirely separate keywords, and so we recommend that you take the time to look at which keywords are driving traffic through Yahoo’s organic listings, and check that you have presence for those in Bing’s organic results. One place to go for information about the traffic which Bing sends you is Bing Webmaster Tools – it could help you to optimise your webpages and maintain and build upon your prominent listings.

This blog post was written by Sarah

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