Bing, Yahoo! and Small Businesses

September 1, 2010
 

With Bing now officially powering Yahoo!’s index, the question of how the partnership affects users and search engine marketers is pressing. However, there is evidence that Yahoo! will retain its own algorithm as the BOSS API remains available and the engine has maintained that it has not quit the search business. Analysts have also raised the difference between search market share and search engine yield. While Yahoo! and Bing’s partnership may consolidate the pair’s search engine market share in the engines’ competition with Google, a combined search engine yield may actually drop.

Bruce Clay and Brent Rangen at SES San Francisco

Brent Rangen, owner of Optimize Guyz and the winner of the Small Biz Discovery Contest, then talks to Virginia about his recommendations for small business SEO and his takeaways from SES San Francisco. His entry to the contest was an SEO primer that covered off-site and on-page optimization, keyword research and analytics. At SES he reported on an SEO Lab with Google’s Maile Ohye. He shares his thoughts on the multiplying effect of social media on marketing efforts and why a blog is one of the most powerful tools a business can leverage to improve their online presence.

Finally, Susan, Paula and Virginia discuss Google’s algorithm change which seeks to deliver on a user’s intent to receive multiple results from a single domain. Ian Lurie warns that webmasters should not be confident as the update only affects the strongest brands. David Harry notes that the change seems to have wiped out negative results and suggestions when brands are searched for.