Microsoft made good on a partnership it inked with Yahoo almost a year ago, seeding organic and paid search listings for up to 25 percent of Yahoo’s search traffic in the U.S.
Microsoft last July agreed to power Yahoo’s search engine and pay the company 88 percent of traffic acquisitions costs for the first five years of a 10-year deal. Yahoo would provide the worldwide sales force for both companies’ search advertisers.
The idea was to join forces to take on Google in the search market. The incumbent commands a 66 percent search share in the U.S. Microsoft and Yahoo together would hold roughly 30 percent.
Mark Morrissey, senior vice president of product management at Yahoo, told Search Engine Land some of the test results will have the “powered by Bing” tag, which will appear at the bottom of Yahoo’s search Web pages when the changeover is complete.
Some users may see differences in how Yahoo is displaying certain search results due to product configurations the companies are testing.
However, Web pages on Yahoo’s search engine should look the same to the user even though one-quarter of search results are powered by Bing, said Kartik Ramakrishnan, vice president of Yahoo Search Product Operations.
For example, in this screenshot the boxed areas of the search results page are coming from Microsoft, but the rest of the page is powered by Yahoo.
The companies which issued a roadmap of that complex integration in May, said U.S. and Canada organic search listings for desktop and mobile will be powered by Microsoft in August/September, with paid search following in October.
Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft have been talking to their customers to ease the transition of their ad campaigns to Microsoft’s adCenter, said Satya Nadella, senior vice president for the online services division at Microsoft.
Nadella noted that webmasters, must familiarize themselves with how the Bing crawler interacts with their Website to prepare for the algorithmic transition.
“During this testing phase, it’s important to look at how your site is showing up in search results on Yahoo and Bing today, so you can assess if there are any tweaks you need to make or feedback you need to share with the team to make sure your site is accurately represented in Bing’s results,” Nadella said.
He added that webmasters must align their search crawler polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Webmasters can peruse more info on Bing’s new webmaster tools here.