July Search Engine Rankings

The ComScore monthly Search Engine numbers for July are out revealing that Bing made a 2% Gain in July 2009 again at the expense of Google and Yahoo.

As I mentioned last month when Bing gained 3%, it's early (only 2 months data) and the numbers don't show a real trend yet. We'll have to wait and see how it all settles out over a few more months.

Yahoo and MS deal on again

If it actually happens this time.... the deal is a good news bad news thing for advertisers and consumers. The current iteration being tossed around the media is that MS will control Search on both Yahoo and Bing and that Yahoo will control ads on both sites.

I like the idea of making one ad buy that gets me both Yahoo and Bing, it just makes management easier for the 25% - 30% that isn't Google. But, I'm not sure I like the idea that there are really only two search engines of importance from a natural search standpoint. It will be interesting to see how they roll that out. Will Bing simply take over Yahoo SERP's or will there be a mixing of the two?

Also, how do we SEO's deal with them? An 800 lb. gorilla (Google) and a 600 lb. gorilla (Yahoo, Bing hybrid)?

Yahoo & Google

It remains to be seen if this historic friendly pact between the two search engine superpowers will be permitted by US Federal regulators.

Yahoo's New Ranking Model goes live Feb. 5

We got the announcement today that Yahoo's New Ranking Model goes live February 5. This is the change to the PPC ranking algorithim that was announced at the SES show back in August '06. According to the article, Yahoo will convert all U.S. accounts to the new system on February 5 whether they’ve been upgraded or not.

Yahoo says "this is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the quality of your ads." They further tell us that, "By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and lower cost for your ads."

So what does this mean to you? It means that your ads at Yahoo will be ranked in a process similar to the one at Google Your rank will be determined by the "quality" of your ad and your maximum CPC.

To further confuse things, they also announced that "After February 5, you may notice that some of the search terms for which your ads appear may display more or fewer ads in the top-left area of the page. This could affect your click-through rate and overall traffic on these ads."

So be prepared for changes in rank and expect to have to revise your ads more frequently as this all shakes out before it settles down.