The latest comScore Press Release shows that between them, Bing and Yahoo! now have a 30% share of the US search market. The two search engines are set to merge later in 2011, which would create a serious competitor to Google.

Whilst Google is still far in the lead, with over 65% of all searches, the percentage of queries made using its system has dropped by 0.3% in April compared to March. Bing and Yahoo! each rose by 0.2% during this time.

In the UK, the amount of market share that Google has is believed to be 90%+, though Bing is rising in popularity on this side of the Atlantic too, so it certainy shouldn't be ignored by search engine marketers.

Our Pay Per Click team has found, across many businesses and markets, that Bing and Yahoo! traffic may be a lot lower in quantity, but it redeems itself in quality. In sectors as diverse as software, insurance, training and clothing, conversions were slightly more expensive when sent over from AdWords than they were from traffic brought in by the adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing systems.

If you are an AdWords advertiser then we recommend testing out adverts in adCenter. Now is a good time to get started - before the rush.

In a clean-up of its services, Yahoo! is about to remove a number of “underperforming” websites, including a few very well known brands.

Those of us who have been involved in search engine marketing for years will remember when Altavista was the Google of its day. Anyone involved in social media marketing will undoubtedly have spent time on the bookmarking website, Delicious.

In addition to these two sites, AlltheWeb (another search site), Babelfish (a translation service), Buzz (a news aggregation site) and MyBlogLog (a social media network, similar to Facebook) are all also likely to be taken off the web.

For the sake of posterity, here’s a screenshot of Delicious:

 

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said “Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond...We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months...We will communicate specific plans when appropriate."

The company is also planning on cutting its workforce by 4%, which equates to about 600 jobs.

If your website receives traffic or has links pointing to it from any of the Yahoo! properties that are going to disappear then put measures in place to limit the impact. Start taking advantage of other social media, bookmarking and blog sites ASAP, to strengthen your link profile and the number of referring sites.

With Microsoft Advertising adCenter now providing all paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing in the US, and Bing supplying the organic search results for Yahoo! Search, they have just announced that this will be rolled out in select markets across europe and the UK in early 2011.

The european transition will begin with the UK, France and Ireland with all of europe expected to be completed by early 2012.

Current advice is to continue using adCenter as normal but to expect further information regarding the pending changes approximately 3 months prior to any changes taking place.

This week Yahoo! announced that their transition from Yahoo! Search powered results to Bing search results is complete. The organic results are now powered by Bing in the US and Canada, whilst the search ads are still from Yahoo!

As a result of the deal signed over a year ago, Microsoft now owns 28.1% of the US search market (as of July’s 2010 comScore numbers), though this figure still represents less than half of the 65.8% share held by Google. In the UK, Google’s market share is thought to be closer to the 90% mark.

The change may not be immediately apparent to Yahoo! users, as the search interface will remain the same. However, the eagle-eyed will notice on the status bar in their browser that the search data is actually loaded from Bing.

Another crucial factor in the deal is the migration of Yahoo! search advertisers to Microsoft’s adCenter platform. This stage is currently still under development, with Microsoft “optimistic about completing this phase later this year.”

So what does this mean for businesses? The main thing is that there is one less search engine to optimise a site for. If your sites were high up on Yahoo! but not Bing then this is bad news, if however, you were ranking well on Bing, then those high rankings you are enjoying will now expose your business to a lot more searchers.

The other main impact is the migration of Pay Per Click advertisers from Yahoo! Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. The programmes work slightly differently and anyone who was using YSM will now have to familiarise themselves with the Bing system.

According to a recent report by Advertising Age, an exciting new deal is in the pipeline between Yahoo! and Microsoft. If it goes ahead, Yahoo! will use Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine instead of its own, effectively joining forces to become a more serious competitor to Google.

The deal could have a huge impact on Search Engine Optimisation. comScore reported that Google commanded an impressive 65% share of the search engine market share in June, while Yahoo! and Bing held 19.6% and 8.4% respectively. If all of the current Yahoo! users were to continue using Yahoo! via Bing, their combined share would reach 28%, which could really begin to challenge Google in the future.

So what does this mean for your SEO? A number of possible things. If your website currently ranks well in Yahoo! but not in Bing or Google you could really be in trouble of not ranking at all. Alternatively, a website at the top of Bing and Google but not for Yahoo! could see a considerable increase in traffic, as Yahoo! users will now see their site via Bing’s engine instead.

Pay Per Click advertising could also see a major change. Either Yahoo! Search Marketing will be replaced by Microsoft adCenter, or the two will merge. This could affect the Cost Per Click and positioning for many of the Sponsored Links found when a search query is made.

In recent years, Google has been criticised for its strict rules and T&Cs as well as its somewhat monopolistic nature towards the World Wide Web. This is fairly understandable, given that two-thirds of all Internet searches are run through them. However the Ying/Bahoo! engine could encourage Google to relax or change some of its policies and prices, especially if the combined alternative becomes popular enough to claw away some of Google’s dominant market share. This could have a radical effect on AdWords, AdSense and other Google services in the way that they’re operated and managed - perhaps a potential sigh of relief to many search engine marketers.

Overall, the important thing to understand is that change could be on the way, with this new partnership being a possible indication of things to come. Anyone who believes that Google will remain the king of the search engines forever will be hugely unprepared if Bing and Yahoo! meet or even overtake its share of the search engine market. Of course this might not happen at all, but it’s best to be ready, just in case.