Yahoo Search results now powered by Bing

The Yahoo and Bing team informed SES San Francisco attendees of the major benefits of the search alliance.   In the near future, 30% of the market share will now be managed through one adCenter.  As of yesterday, Yahoo organic results are now being powered by Bing.
Here are 6 steps to prepare for transition as Advertisers:

• Keep your existing adCenter account and augment: this maintains historical data and allows months to focus on enhancing account structures.
• Analyze campaign and AdGroups: Familiarize yourself with adCenter features, perform campaign analysis and build out your campaigns, check your structure and campaigns post – account transition (make sure you are familiar with import mapping of campaign & ad group settings, and tweet where necessary).
• Maximize keyword coverage: understand keyword differences across platforms. Make sure to bid on plurals, variations, and popular misspellings of the queries that matter to you most.
• Match types: match types in adCenter are aligned with the industry standard.
• Budget for the increase in impression and click volume: managed advertisers are required to sign new IOs for the unified marketplace and Yahoo reps are now ready to guide for Q4 budget allocation for Bing and Yahoo. Self Serve advertisers should seek online help through adCenter.
• Monitor, measure, modify and repeat: optimize accordingly.

Now that your ads are taken care of, how should you prepare your site for the transition? Anthony Garcia with Bing states that ranking is 100% based on how Bing indexes and ranks relevance for sites. Content is still king and SEO principles remain unchanged. Make sure that you give Bing crawlers access to crawl sites.  Change user agents from msnbot to bingbot (Oct.1). Be sure to continue to use Yahoo Site Explorer because oversea markets will take longer to transition.