The key updates and changes include:

• Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed in Robots.txt and Malware headings.
• Improving Email Alerts: This include malware alerts, crawl increase requests, and more.
• URL Normalization Suggestions: Bing will offer URL normalization tips but turn them off by default. Also they have increased the number of query string parameters from 25 items to 50 items per site.
• Deeper Data In Index Explorer: So with this, please expect Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool.
• DNS verification: You can now verify your website via DNS for domains in your account.
• adCenter Data Integration: Avg CPC column will now show up in the Traffic data.

According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that.

Based on search data from its panel of more than two million US-based internet users, the Kantar Media company says Bing-powered search engines as a whole grew 4.3 percent month-over-month in query volume, driving Bing’s total market share up by 1 percentage point.

Bing (‘MSFT’) and Yahoo’s search products (which are powered by Bing these days) had 14.4% and 14.6% market share, respectively, which means the combined market share of the search engines rose to a healthy 29% in November 2010, according to Compete’s search data.

Bing.com also saw the highest growth in the number of unique visitors, with a month-over-month increase of 7.4 percent (Yahoo’s number of UVs actually declined .3 percent). In November 2009, Bing’s market share was just over 10%, according to Compete.

Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from October 2010 to November 2010, which means there’s only one search engine whose market share effectively declined last November: Google‘s.

According to Compete, Google has seen its query volume decline for the second month in a row now, with a recent 1.1 percent month-over-month drop. Compete registered 66.4% market share for the search engine, down a noteworthy 7 percentage points compared to November 2009.

From TechCrunch

Bing continues to grow and is becoming more important. Its key that your site legal web site is not only found at Google, but Bing as well.

3 key steps to take before all traffic transitions to adCenter

In just a few weeks, Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers will be using Microsoft Advertising adCenter to manage search marketing campaigns on both Yahoo! Search and Bing. To help ensure that you’re ready, it’s time to take a fresh look at your keyword and ad strategies.

Here are three tips to help you prepare:

1) Expand your keyword list
adCenter allows you to bid separately for singular/plural variations and common misspellings of your keywords, which gives you more control in fine-tuning your ROI. Because there is typically less advertiser competition on keyword variations, you’ll have an opportunity to get greater value on your ad spend by bidding on these terms.

Try the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool—a keyword research and optimization tool offered as a Microsoft Office Excel add-in—to develop keyword lists and gain insight into current bids, as well as historical and forecasted search volume. For help on using this tool, check out these step-by-step video tutorials.

2) Set keyword match types
While Yahoo! Search Marketing offers the Standard and Advanced match types, adCenter uses three match types: exact, phrase and broad. If you transition your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns to adCenter, your Advanced match keywords will be set to broad match, and your Standard match type keywords will be set to exact match.

In adCenter, you can specify unique bids for each match type, which allows you to align your bids to individual performance. For example, you can bid more for exact match keywords that represent your core products and services, to help you reach highly qualified potential customers. Learn more about strategies for match type success.

3) Monitor your ads’ positions as you begin to use adCenter
As more and more Yahoo! advertisers begin using adCenter, you may see an increase in the number of advertisers bidding on your keywords, which could affect your ads’ positions. If your ads’ positions have gone down due to increased competition, consider adjusting your bids and setting incremental bids as needed to help meet your objectives.

Remember, you still need to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account until ad serving fully transitions to adCenter in late October. You’ll receive an email notification once this final stage of the transition is complete; then you’ll be able to use your adCenter account exclusively to reach customers on Yahoo! Search and Bing.

Source

Yahoo! organic search transition to begin
Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Testing of paid search account transitions has begun
Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.

Before we make this transition portal broadly available to all advertisers in the weeks ahead, we are currently testing it with a limited number of accounts. You will be notified via email once the transition portal is available.

Commitment to a quality transition continues
As we’ve stated all along, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We continue to make great strides toward this goal, and we evaluate our progress every day. However, please remember that if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may defer the transition to 2011.

Read more at the Yahoo Blog

Is the Yahoo-Bing change relevant to your legal website?

YES because the bottom line is that both Yahoo and Bing produce a good amount of traffic and according to the latest comScore data, Yahoo and Microsoft sites had a combined search market share of 31.6% in June 2010. Yahoo sites had 3.2 billion search queries and Microsoft sites had 2.2 billion search queries in June 2010. That’s a total of 5.4 billion search queries in one month.

So if you can get your site listed highly in the Bing organic listings, then that will carry over to Yahoo and it should produce a good amount of traffic to your site.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR BING

Optimizing your web site for Bing.com is not that much different from optimizing your web pages for Google. Just like Google, Bing requires optimized web pages, good content and high quality inbound links from other sites if you want to see your website in the top 1o results for keywords related to your legal practice.

The difference will be the weight that Bing puts in the different ranking factors. Things that work well with Google might not have the same effect on Bing and vice-versa.  In some cases you might be ranked well at both Google and Bing but not for all keywords.  So its going to take some expermenting to see what works the best and here are some quick tips.

• Optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your site for Bing.
• If possible, optimize each page of your website for a dedicated search engine/keyword combination. The more targeted the optimization, the more likely it is that the web page will be listed in the top results.
• Use the webmaster tools at Bing and register your site and also a sitemap. They also have a bunch of good Search engine optimization tips for your site.

Its time to recognize that Google is not the only search engine out there and that BING is for real and it makes sense to try and get your site ranked well at Bing in addition to Google.

If your law firm needs assistance with their SEO marketing campaigns or if you want us to help you get good Bing SEO organic rankings for your legal site, contact us today.

Just two years ago, Yahoo spent $79 million to rebuff a hostile takeover from Microsoft and preserve its independence. Now, a big part of Yahoo’s future prosperity depends on how well it can join arms with Microsoft on a high-risk, high-reward technical project.

Yahoo and Microsoft are racing to meet a fall deadline for launching their joint venture to collaborate on Internet search, an effort by the former rivals to try to narrow the gap with their much stronger, common foe: Google.

The effort — including the retraining of hundreds of Yahoo salespeople to sell ads for both companies, and a conga line of about 400 engineers who are relocating from Yahoo to Microsoft offices in Silicon Valley; Bangalore, India; Burbank; and Redmond, Wash. — needs to be complete by mid-October if the two companies hope to have the show up and running before the start of the holiday season, the critical make-or-break period for advertisers and publishers.

At stake in the joint venture, Yahoo executives say, is the company’s ability to become an innovative force in search again — something Yahoo acknowledges it can no longer afford without its partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The 10-year partnership has Bing providing the underlying results of Yahoo searches, with Yahoo retaining control of how those results are displayed.

But outside observers say more than just Yahoo’s reputation in search is at stake. Considering the revenue and traffic represented by Yahoo’s 3.1 billion U.S. monthly search queries, the search partnership represents a critical gamble by new CEO Carol Bartz to grab a bigger piece of the search revenue pie. During the first half of 2010 compared with last year, Yahoo’s search ad revenue declined by 11 percent, or $84 million, to $674 million, even as the economy improved. Both Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have made the search transition a top priority for both companies, executives say.

“Really, there is a tremendous amount at stake here for both players,” said Laxmi Poruri, an analyst with Primary Global Research. “There are search engine advertisers out there who are eager for this. They want to spend more money on Yahoo and Bing. The problem is these guys (individually) aren’t getting enough traffic for them.”

If the companies miss the mid-October deadline, they say they will be forced to delay the switch in the United States and Canada until 2011, sacrificing the lucrative holiday advertising season. But Poruri said Yahoo also is under pressure in the long run to continue to generate search traffic for Bing. “If the technology is a disappointment or the traffic acquisition is a disappointment, then Microsoft will go somewhere else to get that traffic,” Poruri said.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo executives say the switch-over is going as well as could be expected, and Yahoo says that all of its search traffic, apart from paid search, could be powered by Bing as soon as the end of August. Still, Mark Morrissey, the Yahoo senior vice president in charge of the company’s transition team, said engineers are sometimes pulling 48- to 72-hour stints to hit key milestones.

“I can tell you, far and away, this is the most complex logistical and technical thing I have ever been a part of,” said Morrissey, who also handled Yahoo’s switch to new systems for its paid search ads and display ads.

“All our day jobs are really that at this point,” said Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Online Services Division.

The Yahoo-Microsoft alliance represents an unprecedented effort by two former competitors to join forces, but it has become increasingly necessary because of Google’s dominance. Google now provides about two-thirds of U.S. Internet searches, and an even higher share in many other countries.

Under the collaboration, Yahoo receives 88 percent of the revenue from searches done on Yahoo sites in the first five years, while saving the heavy costs of the computer infrastructure needed to crawl, index and rank the Internet. Microsoft receives the still-significant search traffic flowing through Yahoo. That is valuable because the more queries a search engine processes, the more relevant its answers, and the more extensive variety of keywords it can sell to advertisers.

Microsoft’s costs for Bing have been huge. Its online services division, which includes Bing and MSN, reported a $2.36 billion loss in fiscal 2010. Meanwhile, Bing gained 4.7 percentage points in market share in its first year, to 12.7 percent of U.S. searches, according to comScore.

Yahoo says its long-term ability to build innovative search products hinges on the collaboration.

“It’s not about the transition,” Morrissey said. “It’s about the future of search, and where we want to go.”

With Yahoo’s share of U.S. searches dipping below 20 percent in recent years, few see Yahoo as a search leader anymore. But Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s new chief of search, says that is about to change. Seth says the collaboration with Microsoft will give Yahoo the resources to develop new kinds of search products that could mimic the serendipity of browsing a newspaper, a sense of surprise and discovery rarely found in the blue hyperlinks of a conventional search query.

One example, Seth says, are Yahoo’s plans to begin offering the “Trending Now” box on its home page to other websites, probably in the next two or three months. Yahoo updates the Trending Now box every few hours based on an analysis of its search traffic, but the featured topics are tailored to users based on geographic location and Web history, so different users see different trending topics.

“The goal is to get users to discover things that they never would have thought about,” said Seth, a former Google executive who arrived at Yahoo in February. “It’s a completely new kind of search experience, one where the user didn’t ask for anything.”

Others are also racing to offer new ways for people to search. Facebook and Ask.com recently introduced new “social search” features that allow users to ask questions of actual people, rather than just query a computer algorithm.

“We think as the social web continues to explode, this is only going to get bigger and bigger,” said Scott Garell, president of Oakland-based Ask Networks.

Some at Yahoo have been frustrated with the more centralized and hierarchical management structure at Microsoft. But despite their history as hostile competitors — Yahoo disclosed that it spent $79 million in 2008 on lawyers and “outside advisers” to respond to Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid — executives say the main challenge is the technical difficulty of the project.

“We’re mutually codependent,” Morrissey said, “on each other’s success.”

Source

NOV. 2009 STATS:

The bottom line is that as always Google gets the lions share of the traffic.  Yet both Yahoo and Bing get a fair share of traffic and can't be totally overlooked.   Yet if want to promote your site, Google is the key, both organically and using their pay per click Adwords program.

source

A Bing Forums thread has Brett saying, and I quote:

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Of course this makes sense. Get a link from a popular site and a
search engine will find that link and hopefully index your site/pages
afterwards. But I just find it weird that a search representative would
specifically name Digg and/or Buzz. I mean, why not mention something
else or just talk about the concept in general. Brett could have said,
to get your pages indexed quicker, make sure to get links from sites we
crawl on a frequent basis.

This is strange for him to say that but a good tip for everyone.

Source: SEO Roundtable

In the “expanded view” of search, what stands out are the following:

• Search volume declines at eBay, AOL and MySpace
• Growth at Bing/Microsoft and dramatic growth at Facebook (20 percent vs. July)

Bing is for real and moving up the charts but they are still a small player compared to Google. Facebook made a 20% jump which is pretty big.

Google and Yahoo! are the losers, both losing 0.3% in share last month. Ask and AOL held steady with no gains or losses.

Bing was also the only search to grow its total search queries in
July 2009. This also happened in June, when Bing was the only one to
gain. Bing saw 3% gains in search queries in June, followed by a 2%
increase in July for a total of 5% increase in just two months.

Meanwhile, YouTube's growth slowed last month to just 1%. YouTube
has been on quite a tear recently and experienced a whopping 7% growth
in June. The JK Wedding Dance video was huge in July, so perhaps
they're reaching market saturation.