Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform

[Brett_Tabke]

I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete (for more information, check out Microsoft’s blog post).

Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come. The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous. I’d like to express my sincere appreciation for each person who contributed to this great accomplishment. [ysearchblog.com...]

Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada (English only for now, the other languages will come in the weeks and months ahead).

So what’s next? We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall. As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season. [bing.com...]

[ByronM]

Looks good so far (serp wise) - anyone see any differences refer wise?

[maximillianos]

Nice! Look forward to seeing my stats once the day is over. We saw some pretty decent traffic from the Bing engine, so this might give us a nice small bump up!

[J_RaD]

looking good, traffic still stable from both platforms, paid and organic.

[keyplyr]

Happy Days!

[JAB Creations]

Massive fail, reduced choice is never a good thing.

- John

[SEOMike]

Yellowpages are all over the Yahoo SERPs now. Kind of like Google back in 2003. What's after the yellowpages results? Spammers and FFA directories. Sad.

[outland88]

Yesterday and today when I checked though they had pulled the Bing results back from All the Web, Alta Vista etc. Apparently they don't want to put everything in one basket.

[CainIV]

Looks good to me. Seen a significant bump on a few websites overall since the switch.

No increase in sales in my analytics data. Bing, historically, converts much lower for us. Hopefully consumer confidence from referrals from Bing increase to the level they are at with Google.

[keyplyr]

Stats wise, the first thing I noticed was Yahoo back at #2 in referrals today. Bing had been #2 since their ad proliferation campaign took off.

This is great news for the several sites I manage. Yahoo had buried us for many search terms and conversion had been poor. We do well on Bing placing on 1st page for half a dozen search terms - now that's displaying on Yahoo as well!

[frontpage]

According to our stats today for one busy domain, search traffic breaks down as follows:

1) Google (all flavors) 82.7%
2) Bing 8%
3) Yahoo 7.8%
4) Other 1.5%

[trakkerguy]

Yahoo has been showing bing results for me almost a week now.

On a busy site that got very little yahoo before, it jumped up last week to maybe 90% of bing, and is now just about the same level as bing. About the same stats as frontpage posted.

But I was expecting the yahoo traffic to be nearly double the bing traffic since the serps are the same and yahoo has nearly twice the overall traffic.

[walkman]

My Bing.com and Yahoo.com now show more than 20% of traffic. Yahoo had banned my site years ago and nothing would bring it back so I am glad their pathetic search engine (yeah, I was mad :)) is done.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hey, wait, something isn't right. I'm #2 on one of my primary keywords and deserve to be #1. It will be perfect when you take care of that for me Bing/Yahoo.

J/K, looks good so far and dare I say MUCH better than that other engine who thinks the same site needs to occupy all of page one, lol.

[elguiri]

So, who can give a link to the definitive WebmasterWorld rapid guide to Bing optimisation?

[ByronM]

The adcenter migration will be the interesting part..

[randle]

Yahoo had banned my site years ago and nothing would bring it back so I am glad their pathetic search engine (yeah, I was mad :)) is done.

Their obsession with banning sites was one of the most maddening things about their overall approach to organic search.

I would love to see one of the people from Yahoo that got tossed off the bus write a book about the entire "Rise and Fall of Yahoo Search". It would be fascinating to get some insider insight into some of the really bizarre things they did.

Their journey has been very significant, from the early days when it was a big deal to rank high in the directory, then on to the Google powered days, the Inktomi experiment, and on and on all the way up to just surrendering the whole effort.

Done right it would be an incredible read.

[martinibuster]

The permanent site bans was an inktomi holdover. Yahoo/Ink sometimes felt like it was working off a white list, that there were a core set of trusted sites and in order to get into that core you needed links from that core.

[freejung]

Yep, I had one of those inktomi legacy penalties (not a complete ban, but a severe penalty, I couldn't rank internal pages for anything). Interestingly, they appeared to lift it about six months ago. I've seen a slight uptick in Yahoo traffic since I rank a little better in Bing, but the big increase came six months or so ago when it went from a tiny trickle to roughly what I was getting from Bing.

[webastronaut]

Yep had that old yahoo/ink penalty too on my main money maker. I'm so glad to be back on first page of Yahoo and Bing for my money keywords. Thank you Bing!

[J_RaD]

hm my bing PPC conversions dropped, they used to be out of the park awesome now are kinda low level WTH is going on conversion rates.

[anshul]

This is nice, as we expect good traffic.

All of Webmasters may be happy by this.. and advertisers, publishers as well.

[potentialgeek]

Unbanned--finally--after six years? I like!

Yahoo's demise could have been Karma for its lame bans.

[lufc1955]

Anybody any idea when Yahoo will be using Bing results here in the UK ? Like many, my site was banned about 6 years ago by Yahoo. Have never known why and the site has been updated and checked for problems many times. Can't wait to get some Yahoo traffic but Yahoo UK is not using Bing yet.

[Simsi]

Sorry, silly question, but does this mean that where you rank in Bing will automatically mean you map onto the same position in Yahoo or are there other factors still in play?

[Simsi]

Scratch that. Just found out the answer is, unsurprisingly, yes :)

[skweb]

Reply to lufc1955: The goal is 2012 for the whole world, but if your website is of some use to visitors in the US and Canada, you should already be seeing some traffic.