On August 24th, 2010 Bing and Yahoo! have announced that Yahoo!’s English language algorithmic (organic) search results in the US and Canada are being powered by Bing.  According to previous Search Alliance posts

Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches… that’s 31.6% of the search market share in the U.S. (290 million monthly searches and 8.6% share in Canada).

Microsoft is predicting that it may take “approximately 24 months” to fully transition to Microsoft’s search platforms:

We will begin with the algorithmic search transition, with a goal of completing transition of at least the U.S. market by the end of 2010. We also hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers in 2010 prior to the crucial holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if we determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.

With estimated over 30% of the search market share, it will be very important to optimize your site for Bing/Yahoo! as well as Google.  Here are some useful links to find out more about SEO strategies that work best with Bing:

• Bing Webmaster Tools – helpful resources on submitting your site / sitemap to Bing
• SEO For Bing – Bing’s SEO principles
• Bing Guidelines for successful indexing
• Microsoft Advertising Community – a website that has been tagged as relevant to SEO efforts

Another piece of good news out of Bing came out on August 25th. Microsoft Ad Center now allows thousands of negative keywords. Prior to this change you could only add a handful of negatives for each keyword, making it pretty much useless if you wanted to laser-target your PPC campaigns with Bing.  Learn more about using negative search terms in PPC campaigns here.

If you have not done so already, it’s time to prepare for Bing Yahoo! Search Alliance.  You can also hire us if you’d prefer not to learn the finer details of PPC advertising the hard, expensive way.

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