Much has been written throughout the Search industry over the past few days, months, and years, relative to the “impending” Search Alliance between Bing and Yahoo and the end of Yahoo Search as we’ve known it. And now the time has finally arrived, Yahoo organic search is 100% powered by Bing (in the United States and Canada, for now). Long gone are Paid Inclusion (since the end of 2009), Search Monkey, and the “Big 3″ of search. All organic results in Bing and Yahoo are powered by the same Microsoft algorithm/index. What does it mean? Here’s a run down of other changes so far….

• Any positions your site had in Yahoo that you did not have in Bing are now gone – all rankings are dependent on your site’s ability to rank in Bing now, regardless of past performance in Yahoo.
• Yahoo Site Explorer and the Yahoo Directory are still intact.
• The average user of Yahoo and Bing remain separate demographics.
• The user interface and overall “look and feel” of Yahoo and Bing have remained separate and unique and the two engines are still competing on display advertising.
• Universal/Blended search results are displaying differently within the two engines – which means that a search in Bing may reveal image results, for example, interspersed within the Organic listings that aren’t shown for the same keyword query results in Yahoo.
• Optimizing for Bing is, in many ways, similar as for Google, with the exception that Bing’s index, overall remains much smaller. Your best bets continue to be to produce quality, thematic, and keyword-rich content – keyword-rich urls are also helpful.
• Paid search changes are continuing to transition and roll out separately.

What else will follow? Additions of new partners into the Search Alliance? Removal of Yahoo Site Explorer? The Yahoo Directory? Who Knows? Stay tuned for changes to the above … the Search Alliance continues to be an evolving entity in and of itself.

I spoke recently to an ex-client who is poised to do some work with us again. They were one of our first clients when we started nearly 11 years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday, sitting in their office and explaining to them what SEO was and why it was so important for their business. It was a new concept to practically everyone in 1999.

What mattered most at that time was making sure that there was sufficient content on the page for the keywords that a company was targeting and removing impediments to effective site crawling by the search engines, like Frames.

It’s interesting to see just how much SEO requirements have evolved, while also noting the degree to which they have remained consistent. Content matters more than ever; not just on-page content, but blogs, video and other collateral are now part of the essential repertoire. If you don’t produce content that speaks to a particular keyword, the likelihood of appearing prominently for the keyword is very low.

There are still site architecture issues that can be problematic for the search engines, but persistent use of Frames has all but disappeared from the landscape. It’s important to keep current on what is essential for strong SEO results, but remember that content is still at the top of the list.

Yahoo recently announced that, “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.” This is sooner than most people expected, but what does this actually mean?

Bing and Yahoo will be functioning as two separate entities, meaning there will still be www.bing.com and www.yahoo.com, but the Yahoo organic search results will essentially be served via Bing’s algorithm. To the average user, this shift will not mean much, but to SEOs, it could potentially mean a great deal. For one thing, Bing simply do not have the same amount of data that Yahoo possesses, so the literal “amount” of results for a particular search query won’t be as robust as Yahoo’s. Also, many webmasters will notice distinctly different results in terms of ranking in both Yahoo and Bing, so webmasters who don’t get high rankings in Bing as they do in Yahoo may want to consider adopting more “Bing friendly” SEO strategies. The trouble with that is; nobody knows for sure what the real differences between Bing and Yahoo are in terms of which signals they use in their respective algorithms. As of right now, the most appropriate strategy is to study one’s current positions in Bing and see which pages are ranking better. Bing also has guidelines on how to optimize your website, such as this page for their SEO guidelines: Search Engine Optimization for Bing.