In the aim to combine forces and accelerate the innovation, for Yahoo! has arrived the time to retire. That’s essentially what’s happened last 3rd of August, when the Yahoo! Search back-end technology has been replaced by the Bing platform over 12 European countries.
This transition started some time ago in the new continents while in Europe decided to Bing postpone it for a while; I guess this was to see users reaction and collect feedbacks, which according to the change should have been positive.
The countries involved into this transition are (in alphabetical order) France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK. Also both the mobile and the standard version will be affected at the same time as it is has happened a couple of weeks earlier (July the 22nd) for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand Peru and Venezuela.
I kept monitored the situation for the past few days, and I saw the definitive implementation only today morning. Up to yesterday night, terms like “life insurance” or “vacanze in agriturismo” (so both English and Italian terms) were not showing exactly the same results. Perhaps it was a matter of misaligned datacenters, as it normally happens in case like this. After all, we are talking about a global change which affects a huge number of servers.
What does this mean for the search engine world?
This is a radical change. For years Yahoo! really didn’t make any changes to their infrastructure. They never really improved the quality of their results; they gave not any reason to users to continue using their service.
Their audience was predominantly formed by trusted users, which was using the search engine because for a reason or another was having Yahoo! as their home page.
No surprise then regarding their market share, which has decreased daily. Therefore, considering their importance, I guess this change doesn’t really mean anything from an SEO point of view, and our customers won’t probably notice the difference as most of them are pretty much concentrated on Google and its green bar.
Of course, Yahoo! will continue to exist, but as the results are pullet out from Bing data centres, this means SEOs have now to worry about just two search engines algorithm.
What’s next?
As this change follows the recent decision to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer, to ensure your web site indexationt by the Bing algorithm, webmasters should register their websites in the Bing Webmaster Tools, and taking advantages by the free analytics provided by the tool.