Yahoo has sent the following letter to their search engine marketing customers about change in Yahoo search engine ranking algorithms in July 2010 and now Yahoo is giving stress on quality.
Dear Advertiser,
As we continue to work closely with Microsoft to implement our search alliance,
we wanted to provide you with an update on our progress, as well as call out
some important, upcoming milestones to help ensure you are prepared for the
changes to come.
Transition with Quality
Our goal remains providing a quality transition experience for advertisers in
the U.S. and Canada in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. We’ve
continued to make good progress against this goal, and we regularly evaluate our
progress. However, please remember that, as we continue to go through our series
of checkpoints, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we
may choose to defer the transition to 2011.
Organic Search Transition
To date, we’ve focused most of our communications to you on the paid search
transition to adCenter. However, another key aspect of the Yahoo! and Microsoft
Search Alliance is the transition of Yahoo! organic search results (those found
on the main body of the page). Assuming our testing continues to yield high
quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered
by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.
If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website,
you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change:
• Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the
keywords that drive your business, to help determine any potential impact to
your traffic and sales
• Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for
any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
• Review the Bing webmaster
tools and optimize your website for the Bing crawler, as Bing results will
be displayed for approximately 30%* of overall search query market share after
this change
For more specifics on the organic search transition, please refer to the
Self-service Advertiser FAQs on the Yahoo! Transition Center.
Organic and Paid Search Testing
To help us deliver on our goal of transition with quality, we are conducting the
necessary tests to ensure that all of the many complex, logistical pieces are in
place. While there’s nothing you need to do to prepare for testing, please keep
in mind the following:
• Though much of our testing is already happening offline, this month we’ll also
test the delivery of organic and paid search results provided by Microsoft on
live Yahoo! traffic
• Testing volumes will fluctuate during this period, with paid search volume in
particular kept low enough to help minimize any potential impact to your account
Editorial Guidelines
Yahoo! and Microsoft have created joint editorial guidelines that will begin
taking effect for both Yahoo! and Microsoft paid search advertisers in early
August. We encourage you to review these now, so that you understand any
potential impact to your ads or keywords. Notable changes include new guidelines
for gambling and contests, and disallowed content. For a detailed overview of
the editorial policy changes that will soon take effect, please read the
New
Editorial Guidelines article.
We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as
possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the
benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.
Sincerely,
Your Partners at Yahoo!
