Yahoo and Bing Discuss Search Transition

SEO companies across the globe have been waiting to see how the Microsoft and Yahoo merge will affect search engine results.  Both  companies provided an update regarding the transition from Yahoo Search to adCenter on Thursday.  Rob Wilk, national director of search optimization & Strategy at Yahoo, and Rathna Sharad, group product manager at Microsoft, and others were on hand to answer questions.   As part of the search alliance, Bing algorithms will support both paid and organic search. Bing estimates serving up more than 1.8 billion monthly searches and 2.6 billion through Yahoo. After the transition all paid search advertisers will use adCenter to manage traffic on Bing and Yahoo. The group said quality comes first and foremost. They discussed many important bits of information during a Search Marketing Now Web presentation sponsored by Marin Software.   Wilk told the audience that if “we can’t do this with quality that maintains your volume and ROI, as well as complete it by the holidays, we will push it out into 2011.”

Search marketers won’t have the ability to bid on separate campaigns that run on Bing and Yahoo after the transition, but can create separate campaigns for Yahoo and Bing partners. Paid search results will not look the same on both Yahoo and Bing, but the ranking order of the paid search ads will, though people might see slight differences in the presentation. For example, on Bing people might see three ads at the top part of the page where sponsored results display, but only see two on Yahoo.

SEO Marketers can expect to have the ability to capture revenue in the platforms tracking pixel, follow one combined policy for editorial and trademarks, and support several thousand negative keywords, which follows industry standards.   The adCenter Desktop tool will have upload and download improvements, importing capabilities, error handling and reliability, custom data ranges, and installation upgrades. The companies expect the major investments in adCenter to pay off. Investments in adCenter include migration readiness, performance and scale; redesigned home page dashboard; editorial disapproval roll up; Web import options; reporting upgrades; removal of 92-day limit; and bidding match type in reports

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