As most of you will be aware, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a much hyped partnership agreement at the end of July. The details of the deal, can be scrutinized here, but the most important component by far is the fact that Microsoft’s new engine, Bing, will be powering Yahoo Search.

In the US this creates a humble competitor to Google with a consolidated 28% share of Search… but in other markets, within Asia specifically, this partnership, if applicable, often presents a higher consolidated share than Google and puts a new Search Engine in number 1….  So I thought I’d highlight a couple of points on how this could impact the APAC market for SEM and SEO:

- From a Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC)  perspective there are many countries, including most of the APAC market where Yahoo Search actually powers the Microsoft Search Engine. Advertisers and agencies currently use Yahoo Search Marketing (Panama version) to populate their ads on the SERPs.
This deal, will now reverse all that and require that Microsoft’s AdCenter be launched in all the markets in order for PPC ads to appear on Bing and Yahoo. This potentially means a long delay before we see the transfer of Search Engines in this region… I can’t see it happening in Australia for instance until late 2011.

- From an SEO perspective, today most companies only take the Google Algorithm into consideration when optimizing their pages and content. With Bing powering Yahoo, though, this creates enough of an opportunity for companies to start considering both. Bing has completely different algorithms and ranking techniques to Google and it’ll be interesting to see how companies prepare and deal with having to optimize for both engines. As AdAge reports, now that the Bing/Yahoo deal creates a new entity with 28% share, companies/agencies in the US are already considering the SEO implications…

Since in APAC the deal creates an entity with bigger market share than the one in the US, APAC based companies will have much more to gain from being prepared and start optimizing for this duopoly.

It’d be great to get feedback from any companies that have already started looking at the Bing SEO implications…