So if you have seen a spike in your Bing Webmaster Tools traffic charts, this is the reason why. You should see your impressions and clicks data spike up, while the click through rate numbers may fluctuate from the norm as well. Since Bing now fully powering Yahoo search’s organic results, virtually in most geographic locations now, Bing has decided to integrate their data in the tool.

There are many webmasters who would love an option to filter this data by search provider, i.e. see Bing vs Yahoo data but currently it does not seem possible.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• All New Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Tools Enables HTML5 Interface
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Tools

• Google Webmaster Tools has added “total links” to the revamped link reports.
• Yahoo seems to have fixed the broken site explorer linkage data.
• Google has fixed the blogspot indexing bug and now can index new blogspot blog posts.
• Google Webmaster Tool’s fetch as Googlebot is 404ing for some webmasters
• Google sometimes is using your heading tags for snippets as opposed to your title tags
• SEOs are noticing major ranking changes since Thursday of last week.

I believe that recaps some of the more recent SEO discussions from over the weekend that deserve your attention.

Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products, said ” I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete.” He then told everyone to check out the Bing blog to see what they had to say.

Bing said:

Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada (English only for now, the other languages will come in the weeks and months ahead).

So what’s next? We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall. As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season.

This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo! and our customers, and we are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer.

Shashi Seth of Yahoo also added, “we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.”

The full transition began about a week ago and is fully live now.

You can confirm this yourself by conducing a search at Yahoo and scrolling to the bottom of the page. At the bottom, there should be a “Powered by Bing” line in really small font:

Yahoo is going to more systematically pay attention to search queries to help its editorial staff decide what to write about on a forthcoming news blog called “The Upshot.” According to the Times:

Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.

The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.

The Times’ article suggests controversy surrounding the approach:

“There’s obviously an embedded negative view toward using any type of outside information to influence coverage,” said Robertson Barrett, chief strategy officer of Perfect Market Inc., a company that helps news organizations make their content more detectable to search engine algorithms.

But there really shouldn’t be any. In the abstract the idea of using technology to influence editorial decision-making, especially in news, is troubling to many. But all Yahoo appears to be doing is trying to determine areas of audience interest and focusing some coverage on those areas.

Yahoo appears to be using search queries as a real-time focus group or to uncover specific topics of interest:

Yahoo had been monitoring search traffic patterns and noticed that its users kept trying to find out why divers would shower after they got out of the water. So Yahoo sports writers looked into the question and posted an item titled “The mystery of the showering divers.”

Search therefore is simply one factor in editorial decision-making in this new Yahoo news effort. I would argue this is smart and may lead to some interesting articles.

This is quite different from, say, the approach being taken by some of the content farms, and reportedly even AOL in some cases, where articles are almost entirely written to capture search traffic and are subordinate to advertising because their reason for being is to generate page views.

Yahoo has historically been the top news destination online. But the competition is intensifying.

Google News recently introduced a major redesign with more personalization and social features. And MSNBC recently redesigned its site with less emphasis on page views and greater emphasis on content. This approach flies in the face of many sites, including the wildly popular HuffingtonPost, which have been trying to generate page views with gimmicks, slide shows and even “NSFW” headlines and stories.

The first style guide of its kind?

The press release says it’s the “first guide of its kind to focus on the specific issues associated with developing content for the online medium”. That’s not true, of course. I started using the Yale Web Style Guide when it was first published way back in 1999 when I was still developing web sites and writing online documentation (I still have a copy of the first edition on my bookshelf). I started using the Microsoft Manual of Style in the mid-90s, although it was aimed at both print and online documentation and wasn’t specifically for web sites. Amazon tells me that I purchased Standards for Online Communication, (originally published in 1997) in 1999 as well. A quick search for “online style guide” brings up a number of other publications as well, so I won’t belabor the point.

What does the guide contain?

Maybe the world does need an updated style guide with the latest about writing on the web. I’m not sure it needs another reference manual “covering the fine points of grammar, where to put a semicolon, and the use of the passive voice”, as quoted in a review in the press release. But what else does it contain?

You can find a lot of details at the companion web site. Yahoo has also launched a related Twitter account: @yahoostyle guide (the second tweet suggests web writing be concise and attempts to be humorous, but then links to 655 words on the subject, which just makes me nostalgic for Strunk and White’s “omit needless words”.)

A quick scan of the table of contents shows that the book contains the standard stuff in every style guide: grammar, punctuation, clarity of voice. It also contains the standard stuff found in web writing style guides and reference books: writing scannable copy, ensuring accessibility, writing for mobile devices and email. And it has a chapter on search engine optimization.

What does Yahoo recommend about search engine optimization?

The companion web site first explains how search engines work, explaining that sites at the top of the results list get more visitors. The bulk of the actual advice is solid, although rudimentary.

“Write information-rich copy that people will want to read and link to and … figure out which words people are likely to use in searches, and then embed those keywords throughout your copy.”

There are a few tactical details (links, title tags), but things go slightly off the rails fairly quickly. Do search engines really give more weight to words in bold, italics, and bulleted lists? The recommendation to use the same words people search with is a good one, but even though Yahoo warns against keyword stuffing, the advice still comes across as potentially spammy:

• “Strategically seed your copy with keywords”
• “Search engines, to understand what the subject of a page is, look for keywords throughout that page, including at the top (the introduction) and the bottom (the conclusion). But don’t just shove keywords into the top or the bottom of your page—distribute them evenly throughout.”
• “To a search engine, good writing means using variations of your keywords, including those with different endings.”
• “Like a muffin with the right amount of blueberries, it [the page] should have juicy keywords distributed evenly throughout, but not so many that they overwhelm the whole.”

Yahoo recommends doing keyword research for audience analysis and to determine the highest volume queries to target. (While one of their key SEO tips is to avoid broken links, the link to the keyword research section of the site attempts to access beta.styleguide.corp.yahoo.com.) These tools include Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, Google AdWords, and SEOmoz. They also list a couple of rank checking tools. No mention of the risks of rank checking. And no mention of Yahoo’s own keyword tools, or Microsoft’s for that matter. All in all, the list seems woefully incomplete (no Google Insights for Search?). I have a more substantial keyword research and competitive analysis tools list compiled on my site.

They do list other tools on an “audience measurement” page, including Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer (but no Bing Webmaster Center). But overall, the SEO section seems overly tactical, and doesn’t go as far as I’d like to tie together audience and business needs. (I call this building “searcher persona workflows“.)

Overall, what Yahoo did is not unlike what Microsoft did years ago with the Microsoft Manual of Style. It took its internal style guide, which most mature companies have, and published it. Will it be useful? Probably. But hopefully content owners who aren’t savvy about SEO won’t treat it as all they need to know about search simply because it’s published by a company that has historically maintained a search engine.

Yahoo said, “you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.”

The last Yahoo update was on March 11th. I have personally not seen any discussion or webmaster chatter about Yahoo changes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen much discussion around fluctuations in Yahoo’s search index recently, but maybe some significant changes are coming soon?

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

Back in October, Google went a step further and announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains. On Thursday, Parthasarathy said Bing has no current plans to follow suit, while Bhattacharjee said Yahoo is exploring the possibility of cross-domain canonical tag support.

We actually expected this to be announced. I was tracking a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were noticing ranking changes at Yahoo Search. So now we have confirmation.

Yahoo said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

The test was simple. I placed a unique word in the meta keywords tag on the home page of Search Engine Land. This word — xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk — generated no results on Yahoo when I looked earlier this week. Today, when I searched, it brought back the Search Engine Land home page. Thus, Yahoo indeed indexes the content of that tag. (And to be clear, I looked before writing this article. In short order, this article itself, along with others, will appear because they’ll make use of that word).

During the session last week at SMX East, when Yahoo said it no longer supported this tag, several in the audience said they didn’t believe it. I was kind of struck. You’ve got a search representative flat-out saying they don’t do something, but no one wants to believe them? How things have changed. Sure, I can see distrust on some controversial issues (such as whether Google really does not count nofollowed links out of Wikipedia). But why would Yahoo lie about something like meta keywords support?

To be clear, I don’t think Yahoo was deliberately lying. The representative was probably confused in some way. Similarly over at Bing, despite them NOT supporting the tag (it’s not mentioned here) and never having done so since they launched their own search technology, they recently blogged much advice about using the tag.

As I commented about this:

That reads like someone got a copy of really old SEO advice and decided to put it out there regardless of what Bing actually does. I mean, my head hurts, but not everyone cared about commas or not. And no one had this 874 character limit. I mean, if you went over, it was no big deal. And the don’t repeat more than 4 times? According to what. Microsoft never, ever had its own guidelines like this.”

It’s a good reminder to the search reps. In many ways, you occupy god-like status on issues relating to SEO. Everything you write, everything you say will be fully believed by some. And if you’re not correct, you’ll confuse people and cause others to lose faith in you. If you don’t know, don’t say — or qualify: “I’m not sure” or “I’ll check on that.”

Postscript: Yahoo’s sent me this:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words.  Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.