What Does The Yahoo and Microsoft Partnership Mean For Your Web Strategy?

As you have probably heard about 100 times – Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered on 10 year search deal making Bing the primary technology behind Yahoo’s search engine.

What this means is Bing’s market share just jumped from around 8% to around 30% – which means you need to pay attention to this. Ironically the day before this announcement we posted two Bing related optimization posts:

Bing SEO Tips

Bing Website Optimization Guide

We were just as irritated as you with this announcement because it adds another item on our plate to optimize and analyze – but the results will be worth it. Here are some other posts from around the web that you can use to understand what this partnership means to you.

SEOMoz – Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal Changes for SEO
#1 – SEO for Bing is Worth Your Optimization Effort
#4 – Bing’s Webmaster Tools Are Important
#5 – Yahoo! & Bing Local Become More Essential
#7 – Bing Will Get Lots more Data

SearchEngineLand – What Site Owners, Web Developers, And SEOs Should Know About the Yahoo/Microsoft Deal

The big question is will this partnership significantly change market share percentages? Depending on whose numbers you use, Google has either 65% or 74% share in the US (more in some European countries). That puts the combined Yahoo/Microsoft share at 28% or 25.5%. That’s substantial traffic, sure, and worth paying attention to

Do you have any questions about this partnership? Let us know in the comments!

[image via SEOMoz]