Important Updates Search Transitions

Important Updates on Search Transitions

Organic transition beginning this week; paid search transition testing happening now

As we continue to work toward implementing the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we’ve reached some very significant milestones and wanted to share this important news with you.

Yahoo! organic search transition to begin

Later this week, we will begin the work of transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search over to the Bing platform. This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers.

You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Testing of paid search account transitions has begun

Soon, you’ll be able to access a transition portal from within your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This portal will walk you through the simple step-by-step process of creating a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and importing your campaigns, or linking an existing adCenter account that you may already have.
Before we make this transition portal broadly available to all advertisers in the weeks ahead, we are currently testing it with a limited number of accounts. You will be notified via email once the transition portal is available.

Commitment to a quality transition continues

As we’ve stated all along, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We continue to make great strides toward this goal, and we evaluate our progress every day. However, please remember that if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may defer the transition to 2011.
We’re looking forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance!

— The Team

Yahoo Microsoft Search Webmasters

Today we’ve shared our latest milestones in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. We want webmasters to know that the Yahoo! Site Explorer team is planning tighter integration between Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center to make the transition as smooth as possible. The information that you provide about your website and its structure using Yahoo! Site Explorer has been extremely useful in helping us maintain the freshness and relevancy of our search results, and as you know, it helps ensure that your website gets great search traffic.

Later this week, organic search listings on Yahoo! Search will start to be powered by Bing in the US and Canada (English) markets, and webmasters should begin familiarizing themselves with the Bing Webmaster Center tool.

However, you should continue to provide your site information to Yahoo! using Site Explorer, because in many parts of the world search results will continue to be powered by Yahoo!’s systems until the full transition is complete for all markets by early 2012. This will help to ensure that you continue to get high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites, even in markets that are not yet transitioned to Microsoft’s systems. We will share site information that you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period, to ensure that you get high quality traffic from search results that are powered by Bing also.

Once all markets are being served by Microsoft, we plan to refine the focus of Yahoo! Site Explorer, and webmasters should use Bing’s Webmaster Center to provide information about their website and its structure. Of course, we will notify you well in advance of all markets being transitioned to Bing’s content systems.
Yahoo!’s Site Explorer team is continuing to innovate and provide new features for webmasters. We are planning features that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic that you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites. Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime we would love to hear from you as to how we can serve the webmaster community better.

Please review these FAQs for more details.

Hemant Minocha
Product Manager, Site Explorer, Yahoo! Search