Will the Yahoo/Bing Merger Affect Search Engine Optimization in PA?

When Yahoo and Bing merge in August or September of thisyear, the Bing search engine will be powering 30% of all search results in theU.S., and companies that rely on either organic or paid search from Yahoo!should be prepared for the change.  Yahoo!has started its integration testing with Bing, and the actual transition toBing organic search results is set to take place in August and September, withthe PPC transition scheduled for October. If there are any problems, thecompanies will wait until after the December shopping season to complete themerger so that online retailers will not be impacted. The Yahoo! home page willstill show mail, news and other applications as it does now, only the paid andnatural search results will be powered by Bing.

You can view a presentation from Yahoo! on the Yahoo!/Bingsearch alliance here.

In addition to this change, the Bing search bot will alsochange on October 1, 2010.  Right nowBing works with MSNbot 2.0, and "Bingbot", a brand new engine currently in teststatus, will replace this.

What will this mean for search engine optimization inPennsylvania (PA)?  You may need to checkyour robots.txt file to make sure the bot exclusions are set correctly afterthe rollout in October, but Bing has stated that if there is no directive forBingbot, then it will continue to follow the directive set for MSNbot, so youdon't have change anything.  If you have directivesin your robots.txt file for both bots, make sure they are the same because inthat case Bingbot will ignore directives for MSNbot.

Both Google and Bing search engines value quality links andoriginal, keyword-rich content from cleanly coded sites. There are somedifferences in the Google and Bing user interfaces but the following guidelinesfor good search engine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA) should still apply:

• Make sure any old pages redirect permanently to current pages
• Validate HTML and remove any broken links
• Check to make sure your content is unique, and continually update your website content
• Make sure all your text (keywords) is visible
• Create smaller pages which link together and focus on only one topic
• Use text navigation (with keywords in text links) - not images
• Add both an XML and HTML sitemap
• Make sure your website is set up on Bing Webmaster Tools and there are no errors
• Take a look at the "Bing Cashback" comparison shopping engine if you have an ecommerce site.

In addition make sure that links to your site are not paidor from link farms.

Bio: Sue McCrossin owns and operates PAInternetMarketing.comand hopes to educate her clients on the upcoming Yahoo! and Bing merger tomitigate the impact for searchengine optimization in Pennsylvania (PA).