Yahoo becomes Bing?!

Well, the big news recently (did I mean big or monumental?) is that Yahoo and Microsoft have finally come to an agreement over bringing their two offerings together (well an agreement to do so for 10 years). Simply put Microsoft will now power search for Yahoo and Bing will power the 'self serve' PPC advertising on both sites.

So what does this mean?

• This is a huge deal, more akin to changing the course of two supertankers: it will take up to 2 years to come into effect;
• The combined players will be looking at a search market share of up to 15% (compared to Google's 80%);
• Bing's PPC advertising will get a bigger audience, reducing the fragmentation in the market and making it more worthwhile people advertising with both Google AdWords AND Microsoft AdCenter. That said, this will also no doubt drive up the costs to advertise on this platform!
• Bing Local will become even more important for local SEO targetting of businesses (it's just a shame they haven't revealed publicly how to get listed in anywhere other than the US yet)
• We may well lose our favourite tool: Yahoo site explorer. This currently is the ONLY half-decent (based on real search engine data instead of tiny sample sets) free way of examining links to your website for Search Engine Optimisation purposes and - whatsmore - those of your competitors!

So, lots to consider... the SEO market continues to evolve!