Yahoo is now being powered by Microsoft’s Bing. Critics and media are raving about Bing and the direction it’s taking, but don’t expect this to produce any short term organic gains. Organisations could even expect a short term organic loss, if their optimisation strategies have focused mainly on Google.
Most of the major sites are heavily dependent on Google search results and almost neglect Yahoo and Bing. Bing has replaced Yahoo’s algorithm and reveals different search results. For large retail sites, Bing produces organic traffic for about one page while Yahoo produces organic traffic for about 1.5 pages. This fact is compounded by the volume of search traffic from each engine to the landing pages. It can be observed that Yahoo’s engine yield on a per page basis has been about twice than Bing’s; because of higher traffic volumes sent to landing pages and across greater quantity of landing pages. One can estimate the impact of this organic traffic redistribution to businesses.
This difference may be explained somewhat by taking into account the large user base of Google and Yahoo. Lager audiences conduct diverse search queries which in turn lead to more varied set of landing pages. This difference in engine yield also reflects how differences in the search algorithms can negatively affect the discoverability of landing pages optimised for Google. In such a case, Bing’s engine yield may act a limiting factor for pages optimised specifically for Google.
An easy way to overcome this may be to further optimise sites for Google and ignore the others. For marketers looking for a wider audience, it may be wiser to consider Bing’s new algorithm in the picture and optimise their sites accordingly to prevent losses in the coming holiday season.
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