"The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft," says Yahoo’s VP of Search Product Operations, Kartik Ramakrishnan. "However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you’re used to – with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests, you might also notice some differences in how we’re displaying select search results due to a variety of product configurations we are testing."

Yahoo provides the following example, in which the Microsoft-powered parts are represented by the boxes:

As far as SEO is concerned, the Yahoo Search Marketing Team provides the following tips for organic search:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella also says that "now is a good time for you to review your crawl policies in your robots.txt and ensure that you have identical polices for the msnbot/Bingbot and Yahoo’s bots. Just to note, you should not see an increase in bingbot traffic as a result of the transition."

The Bingbot is designed to crawl non-optimized sties more easily. The new Bingbot will replace the existing msnbot in October. More on this here.

Also note that the new Bing Webmaster Tools experience is live. This has been completely redone with a  bunch of new features (and more features to come). Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager Anthony M. Garcia summarizes:

The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through the Bing index in order to verify which of your directories and pages have been included. Submit URLs gives you the ability to signal which URLs Bing should add to the index. Other new features include: Crawl Issues to view details on redirects, malware, and exclusions encountered while crawling sites; and Block URLs to prevent specific URLs from appearing in Bing search engine results pages. In addition, the new tools take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight 4 to deliver rich charting functionality that will help you quickly analyze up to six months of crawling, indexing, and traffic data. That means more transparency and more control to help you make decisions, which optimize your sites for Bing.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX a while back. She had presented on the topic of Bing SEO vs. Organic SEO. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts fully using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

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Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. The company anticipates that U.S. and Canada organic listings in both the desktop and mobile versions of its search will be fully powered by Microsoft as early as August or September. This of course depends on how the testing goes.

Yahoo and Microsoft have created new joint editorial guidelines for advertisers that will become effective in early August. These can be found here.

As we’ve discussed, Bing optimization is about to get more important, and now the time has come to really look at your Bing strategy if you’ve not already been doing so.

Are you prepared for the transition? Comment here.

Investopedia.com

"While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results."

Google’s Webmaster Help Center FAQ

"NO pay for inclusion, and a complete separation of the search index part from the money part."

Google Chief Engineer Craig Neville-Manning, Search Engine Strategies 2004

The good people at Google have long maintained that there is a Chinese Wall between paid search results and organic results – that is, the department responsible for advertising is completely separate from the department responsible for organic search engine placement.  The company insists that Google Adwords is a completely separate entity than the Google search engine, and never the twain shall meet.  This all sounds very good, in theory.  But do they live up to this ideal in practice?

You don’t hear Google talking much about Chinese Walls these days.  This is certainly in part because they have had great difficulty gaining traction in the literal and very competitive Chinese market (headlines such as "Google Hits Chinese Wall" or even "Google Advance Halted at Great Wall of China" were commonplace).  But might there be other, more nefarious reasons?  Is there a reason why we hear less and less from Google about the virtual wall that separates paid search results from organic search engine placement?

What Is Google Really Doing for Its Big Spenders?

It has long been rumored that Google will offer technical assistance in achieving better organic search engine placement to those who spend more for paid search results.  I know for certain that these rumors are true in at least two instances.  In fact, I actually have the minutes from one of these technical assistance meetings after the company met with Google engineers.  While the identity of these two companies is irrelevant, suffice to say that they are companies that you have almost certainly heard of and that they spend millions of dollars on paid search words each year.

To be fair, based on the meeting minutes I have, the advice that the engineers gave to the company does not include anything groundbreaking.  It is mostly common sense advice that a good search engine optimization firm already knows about organic search engine placement and other issues, and much of it is already covered in the publicly-available Google Webmaster Guidelines.  This, however, is beside the point.  Google has obviously decided that it must offer perks to its big paid search spenders to keep them happy (or rather, happy enough to not pull their advertising).  Clearly, one of these perks is access to Google engineers and the ability to glean information about organic search engine placement, a luxury that smaller advertisers do not enjoy.

Organic Search Engine Placement for Sale – The New Google Reality?

From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense, of course.  Big-dollar advertisers make up the bulk of Google’s revenue for paid search, and any intelligent business will take whatever steps they deem necessary to hold on to their most valuable customers.  This is why larger advertisers already have a designated account representative from Google.  I am willing to bet that this perk was not Google’s idea.  Rather, it almost certainly stemmed from the sense of entitlement that those spending large sums on paid search felt and the fact that technical help with their organic search engine placement is what they demanded.

Unfortunately, this reality leaves an advertiser with a small budget for paid search at a disadvantage.  If Google is willing to offer this secret perk to larger advertisers now, what might they do in the future?  Offer price breaks to larger paid search spenders?  Increase the minimum monthly spend to squeeze out smaller companies and please the larger ones?  It certainly has the potential to become a slippery slope, and I am interested to see where it goes next.

One final point – since Google is willing to give advice about organic search engine placement to companies that spend a great deal of money on Google advertising, is the phrase "While Google never sells better ranking in our search results…" truly accurate?  I suppose this is open for interpretation.  It may be technically true, but offering advice regarding organic search engine placement straight from the horse’s mouth in exchange for millions of dollars in money for paid search results isn’t far from selling rankings, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Please don’t get me wrong – I still believe that Google is the best search engine out there, I greatly admire the way that they are continually reinventing themselves, and I think they are still the target for those seeking the most benefit from organic search engine placement.  They have the folks in Redmond constantly guessing and always three steps behind, and I love how they have started from humble beginnings to take on one of the biggest corporations in the world (and consistently win).  I simply believe that they have played the underdog, anti-corporate card for too long, and that even if it has not outlived its usefulness, it has outlived its truthfulness.  Google is now a huge multinational corporation that answers to its shareholders.  To pretend anything otherwise is silly, but it seems that, for now at least, the charade will continue.

Google’s overriding principle, one that they have been happy to espouse to the media, has long been "Don’t Be Evil."  Whether they still adhere to this principle since they have become a public company is another question that is open for interpretation.  If you are a smaller advertiser and feel that Google’s favoritism toward larger paid search customers regarding organic search engine placement is evil, it probably seems as though the "Don’t Be Evil" principle no longer applies.  You may conclude that the principles of "Don’t Be Evil" and "Keep Shareholders Happy" are mutually incompatible, and that the latter has gained the upper hand.

ComScore Marketer lets companies flag well- performing search terms on a site and category level along with analyzing searchers and the use of search terms by demographic segment. The service also identifies who is competing on search terms.

"comScore Marketer is a new service that gives marketers a powerful and comprehensive set of tools to assess their online marketing performance," said Dan Lackner, senior vice president of comScore.

"The granular information on both searchers and search terms available through this service empowers users with actionable search marketing intelligence."

One of the main benefits of the tool is that it can perform competitive analysis of a category based on organic and paid search Click Through Rates.

An example is the analysis of the terms "credit card" or "credit cards" for June 2007, the service revealed that sponsored links accounted for under a quarter of the click-throughs for both search terms, while users clicked 76 percent of the time on organic results.

Are Big Brands Stealing (Buying) the SERPS?

Coke still hasn’t quite figured it out yet, as KillerCoke.com is still staring at them menacingly from the number four spot. Pontiac and Mazda, after a short scuffle over competitive keyword bidding, seem to have forgotten each other for now, too.

But notice the domains listed in the organic results for "Pontiac":

1.    Pontiac.com
2.    Pontiac.com/solstice/index.jsp
7.    Pontiacunderground.autos.yahoo.com
9.    GmcCanada.com/English/vehicles/Pontiac/index.jsp

You’re saying "so what?" right? It’s reasonable that Pontiac or General Motors-owned sites show up in the top ten. That’s relevance.

But what makes the Yahoo forum greater than ClassicalPontiac.com, or GMC Canada, or any of the other 35 million results?

SEObook’s Aaron Wall would argue that Google is "over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms." This isn’t to say that Yahoo’s Pontiac forum isn’t a great authority, only to note that some links are worth more than others in Google’s eyes.

Wall says big brands with big budgets "have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains." They have a tremendous amount of authority, and can set subdomains to leverage that authority, linking to the sites they want to rank higher.

What may be more ethically questionable than that is that these big brands are buying up the other sites they want to rank higher. The end result of that is they are manipulating the search results so that only sites they own with positive messages about their brands show up.

Add that budget leverage to an innate ability to outbid smaller competitors on highly competitive keywords, and you have SERPs literally owned by big business.

"While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links," writes Wall, "some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains en mass."

He uses eBay (which just pulled its ads from Google), Monster.com, Bankrate, and Yahoo as examples. Yahoo has at least nine verticals with Nintendo Wii coverage, Bankrate nails the rankings for "mortgage calculator" and Monster.com has a bag full of educational subdomains.

This type of manipulation isn’t much different than Black SEO Google frowns on, nor is it all that different from buying links, which Google also isn’t crazy about. This will be Google’s next relevancy challenge, then, to find a way to prevent the dollar from overriding the relevance.

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Her post on the brand terms debate falls on the side of prudent action, namely a strategy that includes paid search. While it may be unsurprising that Google would encourage people to use a business that represents some 99 percent of its revenue stream, Minniear lays out some points in favor of that position.

Control of the brand in search should figure in one’s strategy. "The position of your brand on the page can fluctuate, and you cannot control the message that consumers see," she wrote. "Paid ads allow you to shape your brand’s message exactly as you choose." Competitive businesses will try to buy their way into the interest people have in a brand. If they are bidding on a brand, and the brand owner isn’t, that could place the brand owner at a disadvantage. "If you’re not, and your competitor has an ad show up with a compelling offer, you could likely lose a customer," said Minniear.

She also cited an eMarketer report on brand keywords and conversion rates. It showed a brand keyword conversion rate of 6.5 percent, compared to non-brand conversions of 1.7 percent. As a final point, Minniear said there is value in a diverse message. "People respond to different types of messaging. Perhaps some are looking for basic information regarding a product, leading them to click on a natural search result; others may be seeking promotions, and are more likely to click on an ad," she said. Bottom line, both organic search and paid search are important. —

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The study looks at traffic and conversion data from 20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006. Paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.

It’s certainly interesting to highlight the actual conversion rate. However, it doesn’t help us too much because it doesn’t include the entire search cycle. For example, how many of those converting via paid searh, started their initial research by clicking on organic results?

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.