Google dominates roughly 65 percent of the search market. While Youtube, Yahoo and Bing are constantly fighting over the remaining market share.
Last month the merger of Microsoft webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer was announced. This change comes to help webmasters since yahoo’s search traffic tool Yahoo Site Explorer is set to shut down later this year. This has been the primary webmaster tool for those looking to optimize for Yahoo. After all Yahoo sites have migrated to Bing-powered search results.
“Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer,” stated Hemant Minocha, Product Manager of Yahoo Site Explorer. He further stated that, “Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”
Bing recently announced new features to its Webmaster Tools that will show traffic stats from Yahoo directly in the Webmaster Tools reports. While this move appears to be the start of integration, Duane Forrester, senior program manager for Bing Webmaster Tools, suggests it’s not really the start of something new, per se.
“Data integration is important because it gives you a true sense of what Bing is serving and where you are being served by Bing,” Forrester told Search Engine Watch. “Whether it’s on Bing or Yahoo, it’s all Bing and this is why we’re doing this.”
Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports. Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account. Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected. The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:
To see this new, integrated data, click the Traffic Summary Report or Page Traffic report under the Traffic Tab
- Impressions – will go up based on combined data numbers
- Clicks – will go up based on combined data numbers
- Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate from above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)
Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines. For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine. -Bing webmaster tools
The changes affect the numbers shown only. No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages.
At this current time the data will be combined, not separate. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.
“Any optimization that you do on Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results,” stated Hemant Minocha, although he clarifies that some areas of the world are still on the pending list for transfer to a Microsoft-powered back end.
You now will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages. Many people really like the accuracy of Yahoo’s site explorers back-link data over Google web master tools. We shall see if Bing can continue to innovate it’s search engine and web master tools, to be able fill the void for Yahoo site explorer’s departure.
