Yahoo! to Webmasters: Optimize for Bing Now

Implementation of the search alliance between Yahoo! and Microsoft is only weeks away now, two years after the two companies signed off on the deal. Yahoo! released an update to advertisers on Friday to announce that it will begin serving organic search results from Microsoft's Bing search engine starting in August or September.

The statement advised website owners to make sure that their sites are optimized for the Bing crawler "if organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website." It also indicated that Yahoo! hopes to migrate its paid search ads to Microsoft's adCenter by the beginning of the 2010 holiday season, but that it may wait until the start of 2011 to take that action.

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have been posting updates on their search and advertising blogs to help facilitate the moves.