SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

Having waited months for the final OK, Yahoo’s search platform is now officially powered by Bing. Testing of the integration was ongoing for the last several months and search users saw results very similar to Bing’s. Some search results still vary on Yahoo because they still add their own little touches to the search listings but for the most part, users will be seeing the same results.

For Bing, however, there are some changes to the way search results are listed depending on the term being searched. For instance, doing a search for “safes” on Bing will yield a page consisting of several “sections” of search result listings where users can find relevant information on more specific information related to safes. There is a news section, a buyers guide section, and a fireproof safes section.

So, what does this mean for search going forward?

First, when users perform a search on Google, Yahoo and Bing, they’re going to see two sets of results primarily. There is less variety for top 10 listings to see and users will have to click on the next button for more. It was good while it lasted to see different results and see how each ranked sites in their index. This creates a more competitive environment where the big 3 would do their own thing to bring innovation to the search marketplace. Now, we have less competition and I believe ultimately, less innovation going forward.

Second, the Bing-Yahoo deal sets up a showdown between Google and Bing for search market share. Google is by far ahead of Bing and Yahoo but things can change if Microsoft makes the right moves. With the growing use of mobile search, Microsoft could take advantage of it by negotiating its search engine use on mobile phones with cell phone providers and major handset manufacturers such as Apple’s iPhone. If the default search engine was switched from Google (as is the case in many of the handsets now) to Bing, we could see more Bing converts in time to come if Microsoft manages to pull it off. At the present moment, Bing is added as one of the 3 major search engines offered. According to Chitika, that amounts to about 50% of mobile search.

Why is this significant? While mobile search is small at the moment, mobile search is gaining rapidly and is set to dominate in 5 years according to a research report by investment firm Morgan Stanley:

…we’re “now in the early innings” of mobile Internet development, which is growing faster than previous tech cycles, including the evolution of the desktop PC.

Third, for search engine optimization experts, the fewer the search engines, the less variety of major factors we have to focus on in order to rank well. That doesn’t make the job any easier since there is a smaller margin for any error especially on guaranteed SEO programs which we offer to select clients. Some of our clients have in fact experienced an increased level of web traffic because of better overall rankings on Bing as compared to Yahoo previously. Since our SEO strategies are diverse in nature and intended to deliver balanced top 10 rankings across the 3 major search engines, this switch worked out really well for our clients with many of them dominating Google, Yahoo and Bing at present for their industry related keyword phrases. In a later installment, I’ll offer some juicy details on what it takes to rank well for Google and Bing search so stay tuned.

No-follow links are those links which have the HTML attribute of “nofollow” and can be seen simply by right-clicking on a text link and selecting properties. If you are using Firefox, the little window will display several characteristics for the link. One of them is called Relation. If you see a nofollow after it instead of external, the link you just checked is a no-follow link.

This attribute has been pushed hard by Matt Cutts in an attempt to scare webmasters into conforming to Google’s standards. He wanted those webmasters who sold text links on their sites to add “nofollow” to all their paid links thereby preventing them from passing “link juice” or PageRank. Google would treat these links as untrusted links so no PageRank or anchor text value would be passed. Understandably, the use of paid links skews the Google ranking algorithm towards the site owners who have money to invest in site promotion versus those who don’t.

There has been much confusion with webmasters “guessing” at how the various major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask) treat these sort of links. Many webmasters believed that the use of these links caused the links to literally be “not followed” or indexed. Now, for once and for all, Loren at Search Engine Journal has laid it to rest by getting the search engine’s nofollow treatment straight from the source – the search engines.

His findings are summarized well in a chart:

I find it interesting that Yahoo displays nofollow backlinks from sites in Yahoo Site Explorer but doesn’t count it towards search engine ranking. Live Search has not offered any information on this topic yet.

The search term “Yahoo” more popular than “sex” in Google? According to Google Trends, it is.

The Daily Domainer analyzes the story behind this strange phenomenon. Browser users have apparently gotten used to typing the name of the domain rather than the full domain name with the .com when trying to access popular sites such as Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon and Ebay. Besides the typing of names into the address bar, people use their installed toolbars like Google/Yahoo toolbar in the same manner. This is attributed, no doubt, to Google’s search relevancy based on inbound links to a site helps authority sites like these rank at the top saving the time needed to sort through listings. Only branded domain names will generate any significant amount of traffic from a domain name.

The other spectrum of valuable domain names are from generic domain names. People have a tendency to entire generic names plus the .com extension, examples being candy.com and cellphones.com.

Domainer concludes:

In summary, we can observe two opposite trends: People who “should” type domains into their address bar end up typing them into their search bar or search engine. And people who “should” use search engines to find what they’re looking for, make up domains on the fly and type them into their address bar. You could call it the Battle of the Clueless. And the battle has only just begun.

The value of type-in traffic is strong as indicated by the rising sale prices of premium domain names. You can find a nice list of weekly domain sales and yearly domain sale summaries at DNJournal.com.