Well, it's official, Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President Of Yahoo! Search Products announced on the 24th August that Yahoo!'s organic search results are now officially Bing's search results - the back-end mould over to the Microsoft platform is complete - see the offiicial blog post by the vice president here.

It's nothing new for Yahoo! to have it's search results powered by other engines. Their old results were actually a concoction of Inktomi, AltaVista and finally, Google - so, the fact that they are powered by Microsoft now is sort of irrelevant.

Though only powering organic results in the USA and Canada at the moment, let me explain what you need to prepare yourself for in the coming months with relation to the general Microsoft Yahoo alliance.

I guess the biggest impact that the Microhoo alliance will have is primarily on paid search or more affectionately known, Pay Per Click advertising. By the end of October, Microsofts adCenter paid advertising platform will merge with Yahoo!'s paid advertising platform which is set to deliver a vast and in my opinion, quite volatile keyword bidding landscape. There will be increments in CPC rates (cost per click) due to the platforms becoming one central network, so if you have a paid advertising strategy across these platforms, I suggest porting everything over to AdCenter and re-adjusting your budgets/strategies - maybe even think about using more long tail phrases to maximise your budgets?

i3Search.Worx have done some digging around to give you some of the key interface and account management changes to expect:

- Enhanced conversion tracking options, this includes revenue tracking

- Campaign performance dashboards

- Significant changes to the adCenter Desktop tool

- Negative keyword expansion beyond 1026 characters

- Negative keywords at ad group or campaign level

- Web import options in any format - Google, Yahoo or MSN

- Search network controls

- Reporting upgrades

As you can see at a snapshot, a lot to look forward too - just make sure you are prepared for the changes, otherwise you could find yourself in hot water.

The biggest question we have here at i3Search.Worx is - How good will Bing's organic search index become? - the reason we ask this question is simple - Yahoo! currently sit on a monolithic amount of 'goldmine' data with regards to users search behaviour - and who's going to benefit from this? Bing, of course.

Does this mean with this massive collation and amalgamation of huge quantities of search data, trends and numerous other key elements that the Microhoo alliance will make Google sweat? What will this mean in terms of Search Engine Optimisation? Will there be new variables? What will they improve?

Time will tell - hey, we're excited.

Posted: 27/08/10 07:19