Last month, Bing and Yahoo increased their share of total US searches, at the expense of Google.

Google now accounts for 64% of searches, Bing powered search  accounts for 30%. Both Bing and Yahoo are powered by Bing now; Yahoo gets 16% of searches and Bing gets 14%. All the remaining search engines split the remaining 6% of US searches.

Google’s share is down  by 3% last month, Bing’s share is up 6% and Yahoo’s share is up by 5%, continuing the improving trend for the Bing-powered search engines.

According to WebProNews, Google and Bing are both closely watching activity on Twitter and Facebook. The more people buzz about you and your website, the better your online reputation and link popularity.

Links from prominent people (“authorities”) count more in your favor. So if you get prominent followers and visitors who are motivated to post or tweet about what you’re doing and what’s on your website, Google & Bing will notice.

More at WebProNews.

The Yahoo/Bing “merger” has happened within the past two weeks in the US and Canada. Searches on both Yahoo and Bing are now powered by Bing’s index and pay per click (PPC) results on both will be combined soon. Both companies see this as a big deal, especially in terms of helping them compete with search goliath Google, which still gets about 70% of all searches.

This doesn’t, however, mean that results on Bing and Yahoo will be identical. While both are using the same index (the list of pages on the web with information about their content and linking), the two search engines maintain different algorithms. That means that different ranking factors are being weighed more or less heavily by each of them.

We can expect rankings in Bing and Yahoo to resemble one another more closely than they used to, but our client rank checking shows they’re still quite different.

Web Pro News has a video news report that goes into more detail on this and some of the implications for SEO.

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in June with 62.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 18.9 percent), and Microsoft Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 12.7 percent).

Both Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains due in part to the continued utilization of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together. For more detail on contextual searches, please read this post on the comScore Voices blog.

Ask Network captured 3.6 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.2 percent. More from comScore here.

At Rank Magic, we’re changing our keyword ranking reports to focus on Google, Yahoo! and Bing alone. We’ve found that including other search engines tends to confuse our clients, and since the three top search engines account for more than 94% of all searches it makes little sense to worry about tracking the others.

The official Bing blog recently had a post about web spam. According to Bing’s definition, web spam is “unwanted web content that uses overtly manipulative techniques in an effort to fraudulently attain undeservingly high ranking in search engines.” These are also considered Black Hat SEO tactics.

If you use spammy, Black Hat SEO methods, you might get high rankings on search engines quickly. Unfortunately, searchengines usually detect all spamming methods sooner or later and they will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods. Here are a couple of graphical depictions from Axandra:

If you use ethical White Hat SEO methods, it will take longer until you get high search engine rankings. However, your rankings will grow steadily and you’ll get a much better performance in the long run:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is different from Google and Yahoo in a number of ways. It groups results differently, and provides a number of features that may (or may not) improve your searching experience.

But what about your rankings? Since Bing is going to power Yahoo searches starting sometime next year, that’s something that has many web site owners concerned. But don’t worry. Here’s what Microsoft has to say about that.

Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.

You can download a complete Microsoft white paper on New Features Relevant to Webmasters, with an explanation of all the changes, here.

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally partnered in a search agreement, one that’s been expected ever since Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion in early 2008. It seems that Microsoft will power Yahoo Search and Yahoo will become the exclusive search advertising (pay per click) provider for Microsoft’s search engine Bing.

Suddenly, the Big Three search engines are only two, with results in Yahoo and Bing being essentially identical. There may be some slight differences, so we’ll continue to track client results in both Yahoo and Bing (as well as several others, of course). In terms of techniques for optimizing web sites, we don’t anticipate any change.

Bing is the new replacement for MSN Search (Live Search), and it appears to be somewhat focused on shopping. The current issue of Website Magazine discusses some ways to improve your rankings in Bing, and this one caught my eye. I can see this being of benefit to some of our clients and have alerted them to it via email. Here’s a  brief excerpt for your benefit with my comments in brackets.

Shopping is the focus of the Bing search platform [formerly MSN search and Live Search]. If you manage an eCommerce site [and even if you don't!], you know that user reviews continue to be a factor in driving conversions. Ratings are provided directly within Bing from CitySearch.com,Judysbook.com and Yelp.com. Make sure your site is listed on these websites and encourage new and current clients [customers, patients, etc.] to rank and and review your business.

Everyone seems to be making a big deal out of the proposed buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft. Even NJBiz asked me to comment on it.

While I suppose it is a big deal in terms of the level of competition, and it may well make Microsoft somewhat more competitive against Google, it’s not going to affect greatly how we do SEO o how people will find your web site in the search engines. Google will either retain the Yahoo brand and the Yahoo search engines, or kill it off and incorporate their technology within the MSN/Live search engine. The relative proportion of searchers who go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN may change a bit, but I don’t anticipate anything drastic.

Bottom line: don’t worry – this is unlikely to hurt your search engine visibility.

According to the latest search market share figures released by Compete, the MSN/Live search engine increased its market share by 67% from May to June 2007, putting Microsoft’s share of search at 13.2% behind Yahoo at 19.6% and Google on 62.7%. Over the year, Microsoft’s search traffic is up 47%.