The impact of the Yahoo! and Microsoft integration to SEO

Google’s stranglehold of the search engine market is about to be untangled.

Today, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the search engine experience for users and advertisers.

As described in the press release, “In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”

This will be something to consider for internet marketing specialists. Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) and Yahoo! hold nearly 30 percent of the search engine market. While Google will still hold majority of the market, a 30 percent market share can no longer be ignored by search engine optimization (SEO) specialists.

The combination of Bing and Yahoo! is a whole new algorithm compared to Google. The implication being: SEO approaches to the newly found search engine will be different.

“The biggest difference is the weight given to what goes on offsite in the forms of links,” describes search views columnist Noah Mallin. He says that Bing gives much less weight to links.

Mallin explains: “Bing does give much more weight to the domain name within a site’s URL to determine search rankings. There are a host of other differences that can add up to noticeable disparities in how a site is organically ranked on Google and Bing search results.”

Another interesting question is, how will the integration look like? How much of Bing’s innovative design come to Yahoo!?

With so many innovative features, Yahoo! would make a mistake not to put Bing’s search results features.

However, the overall result of the integration is still unclear, because the true fruition of the deal will kick-in next year. But one thing is for sure: marketers and SEO specialist should start studying the algorithm of Bing and Yahoo! because they will represent a chunk of the market that can no longer be ignored.