It's time to take Yahoo & Bing seriously
Following years of turmoil for Yahoo, things may be looking up.
Since their market share was eclipsed by the emerging power of
Google, their percentage share has decreased, eventually dropping
to mere single figures.
Now, upon the expiry of Mozilla's previous deal with Google,
Yahoo has become the default search engine for version 34 of
Firefox in the US, and search marketers may find themselves having
to adjust their methods.
Within a day of release, the percentage of Firefox 34 users
searching with Yahoo jumped to almost 30%, while fewer than 10%
were doing so on the previous version, as this graph from StatCounter
reveals. Google has suffered a decrease of a similar size as a
result.
As well as the change to Yahoo in the US, Yandex became
Firefox's default engine in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, also
changing from Google. It is unknown whether Mozilla will make
similar changes in the UK and other countries, but it is a real
possibility.
This poses the question: do search marketers need to take this
into account?
In recent years, many marketers have focused solely on Google
due to its dominance of the market. However, Yahoo and Bing now
receive 30% of all searches made in the US. Considering that Bing
power Yahoo's search function, optimising your pages for Bing
should result in an improvement in rankings on Yahoo too, and doing
so seems worthwhile.
The assumption that a page will rank well on Bing or Yahoo
simply because it does so on Google is often incorrect. Bing and
Yahoo favour pages with good social indicators and those with more
content, while it gives less weight to the number of backlinks.
These variations, amongst many others, mean that they often display
different results on their first pages to Google.
Fortunately, Bing makes things slightly easier for marketers
than Google does, by offering a range of handy tools and resources
to help you, including their Webmaster Tools, SEO
Analyzer and SEO Tool Kit.
Nobody can be sure of what the future of search is, but it is
apparent that Yahoo hasn't thrown in the towel, and could be
getting a second wind. Those focusing entirely on Google risk being
left behind; are you prepared?
Posted By
Tom Offen Filed under
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About the author
Tom has a keen interest in online marketing, and particularly
enjoys helping businesses manage and grow their online communities.
A member of The Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing and a
fully qualified Google AdWords and Analytics individual, Tom can
help your business find and engage with its target audience
online.