Part 1
As an SEO Consultant for Reload Media – I have what I refer to as a luxury, of managing many different websites across a broad range of industries and niches. This ‘luxury’ gives me access to an enormous amount of search data – which I’m sure many other SEO’s will agree with.
I love data. I love getting data and I love analysing it. I have often, in the past, spent hours going through the specifics of keyword rankings to give myself better insight with the intention of improving my understanding of search engine trends, changes and algorithm updates.
While I could spend hours writing about search engine changes in general, the purpose of this article is to discuss how similar (or dissimilar) the keyword rankings are in Bing & Yahoo.
On the 18th of October, Yahoo published a blog post announcing that they had completed their algorithm transition update with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It had taken 20 months, but they had finally completed it.
As a part of our process and procedures, we keep track of the search engine visibility for our client’s websites in both Yahoo & Bing. The questions we were so eager to find answers for was: “So, exactly how similar are Yahoo & Bing now?” and “Is it now worth us tracking both Yahoo & Bing?”. Sure, for the past few months Yahoo & Bing have always had ‘similar’ results, but were we about to see the keyword rankings in Yahoo & Bing become completely identical?
We wanted to find out. The process began by choosing three clients from three different niches / industries that we believed would be good for this report. Stretching across a total of 615 different keywords, our initial focus was simply to compare the rankings data in Yahoo & Bing on their last rankings reports – all of which were within a week of writing this report.
The Difference between Yahoo & Bing Rankings
The data for these 615 keywords was recorded on the same day, more or less, at the same time. Rankings in Bing & Yahoo fluctuate so often that sometimes the rankings are absolutely nothing like they were the day before.
The number of keywords that had a rankings difference was 52 – but the number of keywords that had a rankings difference that was more than 1, was only 8. When we thought about the rankings difference being 1, we felt like it was so minimal, that it wasn’t enough to justify a dissimilar result. Any keyword where the difference was more than 1, really grabbed our attention. For the focus of this report though, we’ll include all 51 keywords.
The largest difference in keyword positions we encountered was 68+. This specific keyword is particularly niche to its industry and not overly competitive. Its rank in Bing was 32, yet it was not found within the top 100 in Yahoo.
The second highest keyword difference was 47+. Which, like the first keyword, is particularly niche to its industry and not very competitive and the result was the same. It ranked 53 in Bing, but was nowhere to be found in Yahoo.
Exact Rankings by Search Engine
The blue line represents Bing, while the red line represents Yahoo. For the most part, it’s easy enough to see the resemblance and how identical the rankings were. The two spikes are also represented in the graph below which displays keyword ranking differences.
Rankings Difference – Yahoo VS Bing
The graph above shows the 51 keywords that had at least 1 rankings place difference. The other 8 keywords (that had more than 1 rankings place difference) are easily identifiable.
This implied to us that while the rankings between Yahoo & Bing are essentially identical, there are still minor area’s where the two search engines handle things differently. There is always the possibility that one of these search engines was playing ‘catch up’ to the correct ranking placement though.
Which Keywords Performed Better?
The second step as part of this report was to find out which search engine ranked those 51 keywords in better positions. With 51 keywords, we knew we were going to have a winner, but the difference again was extremely small.
Bing was the winner. Out of the 51 keywords, 26 of them ranked higher in Bing than they did on Yahoo. This, once again proved to us that there really wasn’t much difference between Yahoo & Bing in terms of overall search visibility.
Keyword Performance by Client
We then took this data and thought it’d be good idea to break it down by client – to see if we could find any additional patterns or occurrences.
The first client we used for this report – we’ll refer to them as Client A, accounted for 21 (out of the total 51) of the keywords and Bing was the clear performer, with 14 keywords ranking better than the 7 in Yahoo.
Our second client (Client B) had 12 keyword ranking differences and of those 12, Yahoo performed better with 8 keywords in better ranking positions than Bing’s 4.
Finally, our third client (Client C) saw Yahoo edge out Bing slightly. Out of 18 keywords, 10 ranked better in Yahoo compared to the 8 that ranked better in Bing.
What Does This Data Tell Us?
This data tells us that while Yahoo & Bing more or less provide identical results, it’s quite clear that a website can perform better in one specifically. The difference will be extremely minor, and it could simply be an error with the time in which we recorded this data, but despite how similar they are – there will still be ranking differences and they still perform differently.
How Similar Were the Results Prior to the Transition?
As we keep track of many keywords on a monthly (and in some cases, weekly) basis, we knew it would be a good idea to compare this data over a four month period to see the keyword ranking differences.
We chose four keywords from the ‘differences’ list that we thought would be a good example to display month on month ranking data.
The data compared starts in August and goes through to the time of this report – November, keeping in mind that Yahoo made their announcement on the 18th of October.
Yahoo & Bing’s Similarity is Inconsistent
The pattern here is that there is no pattern. The major difference in ranking positions for Keyword 1 was in October, for Keyword 2 it was in November, Keyword 3 it was in August and Keyword 4 it was August & September.
The only conclusion we drew from these graphs is that 80% of the time, the results in Yahoo & Bing are identical, the other 20% however – well, not so much. This also provides (for whatever reason) an inconsistency in either Yahoo or Bing. Or possibly even a combination of both.
Stay Tuned for Part 2 where we compare the combined average of Bing & Yahoo with similar data in Google!
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