Back in July 2009, the ball began to roll on a merger of sorts between Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing search engines. This March the deal became more finalized and a shape began to form for what would become a joint search marketing effort. (Read our own article from January this year.)

What has happened since?  Well, not much really. However, any SEO you talk to will most likely have received countless emails regarding how it’s moving forward, how big things are happening, etc. etc.

In case you haven’t heard, the idea behind this Search Alliance is to allow Bing to power Yahoo’s organic search results, basically replacing Yahoo’s ‘search engine’ with Bing’s. In addition to this, Microsoft’s AdCenter advertising platform will eventually replace Yahoo! Advertising.

What is Yahoo! providing for their end of the deal? They are still the #3 most visited website in north america, which will provide Bing with an enormous playing field for ad impressions. In addition to that, they are providing Microsoft with their own search-technologies (albeit for a 10-year license).

The way that the transition has been handled is very PR heavy, with little effect on the users who rely on the services every day.  We still log in to Yahoo Site Explorer, Microsoft AdCenter, etc. and will continue to do so for months, until the dust settles.

Even the official website itself is not 100% certain when the full transition will take place. As a quote taken directly from the FAQ proclaims :

Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.

We will be advancing with a ‘business as usual’ attitude unless there are drastic changes. Will you be changing your SEO approach due to this new alliance? Do you think Google will have some real competition? Leave a comment, or visit us at our Facebook or Twitter pages!