Experts warn that Yahoo and Bing’s alliance could skew SEO campaigns

2/7/2011 4:16 AM EST

TRON Media SEM Agency

An alliance between the Yahoo and Bing search engines is on the cards for the UK according to web experts.  They estimate that the merger will take place very soon, and warn that consequently online marketeers should keep a watchful eye on all of the search engines when carrying out site marketing and online marketing.

Yahoo and Bing first joined forces in 2009 to form a search alliance with the intention of knocking Google off of the top spot. And they recently announced that they have already aligned their search engines in Australia, Brazil and Mexico.  

Kartik Ramakrishnan vice president of Yahoo! Search Transition recently wrote on his blog; “The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance team has reached yet another important milestone today. As planned, we are moving forward with the global transition of certain Yahoo! search back-end functions to Microsoft’s search platform, and have just completed this process for organic search in Australia, Brazil and Mexico. This news is another step forward for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance as we continue our efforts for a quality transition with our worldwide advertisers and partners.”

To date, Yahoo Search is still running the original Yahoo algorithm in the UK, but there is speculation amongst web experts that Yahoo UK will be next to align with Bing.

A discussion which recently took place in the WebMaster World Yahoo Search Engine and Directory Forum has highlighted that some webmasters and SEO experts have noticed that the Yahoo UK search results are displaying two different indexes when the page is refreshed. 

This means that when web users enter a keyword or phrase into the search engine, hits search and then searches the same word again they will see two different search results pages.  And, when the two sets are compared it appears that one matches up with the Bing search results.

On worried website owner posted on the forum:  “I have a new website which is appearing on the first page of Yahoo.com for a very competitive term. However I notice that it goes in and out of this page when refreshing the page.” He continued to write “Ok I can now see results shifting all over the place – there is clearly an update going on. I am surprised that nobody else is talking about this.”

Barry Schwartz posted on the Search Engine Round Table that this is conclusive evidence that Bing and Yahoo are currently testing the UK merger and that the UK may be the next country to align their search engines.  

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