My first thought on the merger was that the sale of Yahoo would be a great monetary boost to Microsoft. This would be done through the consolidation of their competing PPC services and unique searches as well as other operational areas. That being said…..the biggest obstacle would be the integration of cultures and how to continue to manage competing websites.

Yahoo’s user culture and corporate culture are very different from MSN, and more importantly, anything Yahoo would do in the future would be second to Microsoft’s primary business. This can’t be good for Yahoo users, the Yahoo corporate culture and the search engine industry.

Having said all that, how could this merger affect the marketing of websites on the internet. Well, I think that overall, it has the potential to attack Google right where it hurts, their bread and butter of search engine traffic. The biggest obstacle SEM and SEO experts have had in the past in regard to putting effort forward to rank well in either Yahoo or Google or to focus efforts on their PPC programs has been traffic. Without the traffic, the efforts don’t justify the returns. By combining the search results and PPC programs, there can be a justification of putting forward the effort.

I have always felt and many people would disagree with me, that MSN has the best search engine of the big three. The reason is very simple. It is the newest engine and as a result integrates many of the additional models that exist on the internet. For example, Google heavily favors websites with backlinks. This has been the basis of their model from the beginning and this focus has allowed them to flourish.

Yahoo on the other hand launched their own search engine in 2004 and were able to build a better search engine by not only focusing on backlinks, but also by giving credit to well designed websites. A year later, MSN launched their own search which not only integrated the value of backlinks and the value of properly built websites, but also gave credit to web activity through blogs and other forms of online activity. This is not to say that over time Google has not continued to improve their search results, but because the core of their search is based on backlinks, this continues to drive search results today and has hurt their overall search results in my opinion.

So, if this merger happens and I think that is still a big IF, and Microsoft is able to integrate Yahoo in a way where they can consolidate some areas while at the same time keeping Yahoo independent, this can be a big win and they can create a better platform to compete against Google. Otherwise, Google will continue to be the dominant player in the search industry, and SEO and SEM professionals will continue to focus their efforts on Google with Yahoo and MSN being an after thought.

Clearly this is a bold play by Steve Balmer, but he and Bill Gates have done it before with Explorer. The question remains whether Steve can accomplish this without Bill now that he has partially retired.

Bookmark To

• With the new system, you will no longer be able to see the top 5 bids on a per term basis and instead you will see an estimated position. They are making this change because on average, they make more money per click.

• On the new system, they have also integrated advertisement relevancy, which means that the display of your ad not only depends on your bid, but also the relevancy of your advertisement.

If you are a user of Google AdWords, you will find the new system similar to how Google operates their system. Under the current system, in general, you are paying on average 30% less than you will pay on the new system. As part of the change to the new system, Yahoo is allowing users to use the old system until the end of the year.
The new system does have many new aspects, like geo targeting, but the benefits of staying with the old system out weigh the benefits of upgrading at this time.
If you have additional questions, please feel free to call or email us and we will answer any of your questions.

Bookmark To