Assuming no one migrates from Yahoo! to Google after the transition, Bing will be powering 30% of all search results in the U.S. Yahoo! confirmed last week that they are starting to conduct systems integration testing with Bing, though if recent ranking results from Yahoo! are any indication, there has been algorithm testing taking place for the past couple of months. 

Systems integration testing is expected to take place in June and July with the actual transition to Bing results taking place in August and September (the PPC transition is operating on a slightly different timeline). If there are any problems, Yahoo! will pause integration during November and December as those are critical months for online retailers who could see a impact on their bottom line if there were major changes in organic search results driving traffic to their sites. While Yahoo! search results will be powered by Bing, it should be noted that the Yahoo! user interface will not be changing and will not show the same related search results, quick tabs, and categories that Bing does.

The web crawler that fuels Bing’s search results will also be changing. As of October 1, MSNbot 2.0 will be replaced by “Bingbot”, which is currently being tested. For websites that have a crawl exclusion set up in their robots.txt file, Bing has said that the Bingbot will follow exclusions set up for the previous MSNbot – no change is required to the robots.txt file by webmasters though eventually you will want to have this updated. If you have directives in your robots.txt for both MSNbot and Bingbot, the new Bingbot will ignore directives for MSNbot and only follow directives for Bingbot, so make sure you don’t have conflicting information for the two different bots as different directives won’t both be followed.

The basics of SEO optimization are the same for Google and Bing: original content with targeted keywords, quality links, and well designed, cleanly coded sites. There are some differences in the Google and Bing user interfaces – Google’s blended results versus Bing’s related search results, quick tabs and categories – which means there are some different tactics for optimizing for some of the ‘finer details’ of SEO.

If you don’t already have your website set up in Bing Webmaster Tools, you should make sure your site is set up and there are no crawl errors occurring that would prevent your site from being indexed or ranking well. I’ve noticed that Bing’s geotargeting can sometimes be off for foreign sites, so make sure Bing correctly recognizes the country and language your site is targeted to. If you are wondering how well you will do on the new Yahoo! search results page, check your current Bing rankings as these will be similar once the transition is complete.


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