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

Yahoo!'s
Twitter integration is part of a new update when the News Shortcut is
implemented in the search results. Yahoo! is also recognizing when there's breaking news and indicating as such on the News Shortcut. 

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.

This will not happen right away, best case the deal will be complete in early 2010, the longest it can
take for full implementation is two years. The integration will begin
in the United States with search and then with search ads. The
integration will then expand to other countries and regions.

The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it
will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by
Bing." Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval,
and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the
integration. So you have time to prepare your site.

BACKGROUND ON DEAL

*  The term of the agreement is 10 years

* Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s
core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to
integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search
platforms

* Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

* Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid
search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its
technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing
display advertising technology.

* Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

* Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales
force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve
advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s
AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be
set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Optimizing for BING will become more important

Since Bing will be the one powering the search results and now having a bigger share of the search market, it will make sense to make sure your pages are well ranked with Bing. I will certainly be doing more work to provide insight into how Bing
ranks results and where it differs substantively from Google. A nice tool to see how Google and Bing results differ is available at the Bing vs. Google search tool.  

Yahoo and Bing LOCAL will become more important

In general Local SEO is becoming more important but with Bing serving up local listings
in the search results (as they do now), Bing's local registration is
going to become very important for local businesses and law firms. Check out Bing Local and their local listing center.

This overall deal seems to be better for Microsoft then Yahoo, Yahoo seems to just be quitting the search engine game and just leaving it up to Microsoft and Bing. I will say that BING has proven to be a very good search tool for me and they seem to be serious about competing here, we will see what happens but remember its still possibly 2 years away before this actually goes into place.

There are several reports tonight that
Yahoo and Microsoft are close to consummating a search and advertising
deal. 24/7 Wall Street cites an investment banker who says a deal is “imminent.” All Things Digital says an agreement is “down to the short strokes,” but also points out that the companies have been down this road before.

Both reports speculate that the deal will include a large upfront payment to Yahoo — the “boatloads of money”
that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said a deal would require — and
additional future payments in exchange for Microsoft taking over
Yahoo’s search and search advertising business. 24/7 Wall Street cites
sources who say Yahoo will get $3 billion upfront.

All Things Digital reports that several high-level Microsoft
executives, including Yusuf Mehdi, Satya Nadella, and Dr. Qi Lu, were
in the Silicon Valley on Thursday to try closing the deal. Their source
also says that this is the end of the road for the long-running talks
between Microsoft and Yahoo, and if no deal is reached “we will all
finally go our separate ways and be done with it.”

MSN is really being aggressive here and it would be something if they did work out this deal.

Source

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

Multiple URLs, one page

Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort  through 1,000 URLs.

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value  the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google  reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.

If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.

The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:

• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good

Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same  content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).

While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.

This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

source: Search Engine Land

Evidently, the whole system is permission based, which means that users can choose to share their location information, or choose not to. This includes giving users the ability to eliminate any stored information about their locations over time from Yahoo’s servers. This should keep the "big brother" concerns to a minimum.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this is that the geo-location information can come from any number of sources, such as other applications, and from GPS devices. You can setup a GPS phone to periodically update your locations information automatically.

The Techcrunch post provides the example of users who make submissions to Flickr who frequently don’t provide any geo-location information for the photos submit. With fireeagle enables, this information could be extracted automatically.

Of course, search engines have been using location based information for a long time. They have the ability to look at the IP address of a person who is entering a search query, and then do a reverse lookup to determine the approximate location of that person. Geo-location information from a GPS device, however, would be much more accurate.

IP address based geo lookup is very general in nature, and in some scenarios can be completely wrong. For example, AOL users may have an IP address that changes mid-session. In other cases, someone working in a company office in LA may connect through their corporate network based in Chicago. There are many other example of these types of errors.

From a search perspective, improved location information can improve the location based personalization that search engines have already engaged in for some time. As an example of this, if you are sitting in Seattle, and type in "Italian restaurant", there is a good chance that you really mean "Seattle Italian restaurants".

However, if you just a few miles outside of Seattle, and type in "Italian restaurant", traditional IP based geo lookup might still give you a list of restaurants in Seattle, where what you may really want is a list of restaurants closer to where you are.

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