It’s been a big week for the search engines, and for once Google have taken a back seat – but will any of the recent changes have any bearing on SEO for the individual search engines involved, or for SERPs as a whole?
Let’s look first at the new Yahoo! logo, which has attracted a reasonable degree of criticism despite being largely inoffensive.
It retains the classic elements of the Yahoo! logo, such as the purple colouring and variation in character sizes, with a jaunty exclamation point on the end.
And to celebrate the shift, Yahoo! are showcasing 30 alternative logos that were considered – the majority of which seem to hint at a brief that called for a sans serif typeface.
It’s not likely to directly impact SEO, but it’s got Yahoo! back into the headlines and hints that changes are underway, so it’s worth watching for any future moves that could earn greater market share for one of the all-time great search engines.
Meanwhile, the news broke that Microsoft have bought Nokia’s mobile phones division, which is likely to cement Bing as the search engine of choice for future Nokia handsets, as is already the case on the well-received Lumia range.
This could feasibly make Bing more important in terms of SEO for mobile search, so properly segmented analytics are essential if you have a large mobile audience, and want to be sure of the significance of Bing within your audience.