by Adam Bunn
According to Adam Bunn, SEO head of the UK's leading independent search marketing agency, Greenlight, says Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing's market share over the year, making ''Microhoo'' worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective
Microsoft's plans to buy Yahoo's internet search and search advertising businesses have been cleared by both European and US regulators (See: EU, US clear Microsoft, Yahoo! deal)
This will mean Bing powers the natural search results for Yahoo!, while Yahoo! handles advertising for Bing. This was among the 10 predictions for paid and natural search we made earlier.
Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing's market share over the year, making ''Microhoo'' worth paying much more attention to from an SEO perspective.
However, SEO functionality-wise, Microsoft has so far shown little inclination to offer the kind of information that Site Explorer does, not good news for the majority of SEO's, who rely on Site Explorer for backlink analysis and competitive link intelligence. Bunn explains.
Microsoft and Yahoo! finalised their tie-up in early December, shortly after the competition regulators in Canada and Australia approved the deal. Its approval by the US department of justice and the ECC, paves the way to integration before the year is out.
That will mean that Bing powers the natural search results for Yahoo!, while Yahoo! handles advertising for Bing, leaving the search landscape a two-horsed race - well, in so far as a market where one player has 80 per cent plus market share can be called a ''race''.
That said, having pledged 5 per cent to 10 per cent of their operating profits ($22.5 billion in 2008) to promoting Bing over the next five years, Microsoft has a good chance of increasing Bing's market share over the next year (much as they have in the US).
Yahoo's strategy looks increasingly to be about abandoning search and focusing on becoming a content portal.
This has echoes of Altavista's decline in the late 90's when in the face of declining search results quality they switched tac and became a content portal, before fading into obscurity shortly after.
Only time will tell if Yahoo! can avoid this fate – although it has fingers in enough pies to make it considerably more resistant to decline, including popular social networks, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers and Delicious, one of the most popular webmail services and one of the most popular home pages and news sources.
SEO functionality-wise, Microsoft has so far shown little inclination to offer the kind of information that Site Explorer does; Bing supports neither the link: nor linkdomain: advanced operators that, along with the site: operator, are the foundation for Site Explorer's functionality.
Given that Bing will be powering Yahoo! search results by the end of the year there is every reason to suppose Site Explorer will be retired.
This is dire news indeed for the majority of SEO's, who rely on Site Explorer for backlink analysis and competitive link intelligence due to its comprehensive reporting (in contrast Google displays just a small sample of known backlinks via the link: operator) but good news for the providers of proprietary software and link reporting services, as many people will be forced to turn to them to acquire link data.
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