Yahoo has announced that it is transitioning its search engine to Bing in several more countries, this time in key European markets. Yahoo has been switching over to Bing in more and more countries, after it started with the US and Canada a year ago.
"We are now ready to transition Yahoo! organic search results (the non-paid listings found on the main body of the Yahoo! search page) to Microsoft," Yahoo said in a message to advertisers, meant for the European markets the move is affecting.
"This is an important aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and will help us toward our goal of further improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic results globally," it said.
"The organic search transition will begin on August 3rd 2011 for Yahoo! European properties in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy," it
announced.
Yahoo stressed that only the organic results are being transitioned at this time, i.e. the actual search results and not the paid ads around them.
The company says that it will provide a notification way ahead of time when it eventually migrates the paid search results as well.
Even so, for websites that rely heavily on SEO and search traffic, the switch could have an impact, which is why Yahoo is asking those that believe they may be affected to take several simple steps.
The first and most obvious is to do keyword searches on both Yahoo and Bing, to see the differences, if any, for terms related to their business.
Yahoo is also encouraging advertisers to spend more on paid ads if they believe they will be negatively impacted by the change.
Finally, Yahoo directs website owners and SEOs to check out the Bing webmaster tools and see what they can do to optimize their sites for the Bing crawler, which is the source of all future Yahoo Search results in the countries where the switch has been completed.
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