The Bing and Yahoo alliance means the end of Yahoo Local, right?
August 5th, 2010 by
As we reported in an earlier post, there are things to consider now that the Bing and Yahoo alliance is coming so near. Starting sometime in August or September, Yahoo’s organic search results will be fully provided by Bing, which will increase their organic search market share from 11% to 27%. Wouldn’t it be great if this meant an end to Yahoo Local, leaving you with only Bing and Google local listings to worry about?
Sadly, that is not going to happen. Yahoo plans to maintain control of the search experience, and it includes Yahoo Local as a part of that. As Yahoo quotes here, it will be “Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.”
Look at the picture above and you will see boxes around the organic and paid search results—these will be provided by Bing, the rest will be provided by Yahoo, including local listings.
If you are a local business owner this might not mean much to you, but if you’re an SEO that cares about local listings you won’t get any of the relief you might have anticipated and will still need to claim your listings on all 3 search engines.
