As far as search engine optimizers and marketers are concerned, Bing and Yahoo search are the same thing. Since the Bing-Yahoo search alliance was made official last year, Yahoo sites around the world have migrated both their search ads and results to a Bing-powered back-end. Now webmasters can take advantage of the combined information through their Bing Webmaster Tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools now provides users with traffic data from both Bing and Yahoo. Users should see an increase in their impressions and clicks, with some slight changes to their CTR. The changes rolled out between August 12th and 16th, so users are likely to see a traffic spike during that time-frame.
Unfortunately, you can’t currently filter for Yahoo versus Bing results. What you will see is a combination of the two, with no distinction as of this time. The combined results will be displayed for all countries where Bing is powering Yahoo’s search results. It’s expected that every regional version of Yahoo will have made the transition by early 2012, with the notable exception of Yahoo Japan; Yahoo Japan functions as an independent company and will have its back-end powered by Google.
Bing’s decision to support the Yahoo webmaster data comes just in time, too, since Yahoo announced earlier this year that they would be shutting down their own webmaster tools once every market has transitioned to Bing.
[Sources include: The Bing Blog]
