What the Yahoo Microsoft Deal means for SEO and PPC

As you may have heard recently, the long-awaited and rumored Yahoo! and Microsoft deal has finally gone through. The parties have agreed to a very complicated deal that, although not entirely clear yet, includes the following details:

• The term of the agreement is 10 years
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s search technologies
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.
• Yahoo! Search will be powered by Bing Technology
• Each company will maintain its own separate advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

As an SEO guy, my first thoughts were “what does this mean for SEO?”… here’s a shortlist:

What his means for SEO:

• Yahoo! is dead as a search engine – which is not necessarily a bad thing (for SEOs). The Bing algorithms have been generally more predictable than Yahoo!, and the expansion of this algorithm is probably a good thing. The Bing search engine rankings are following many of the same rules that we’ve applied to Google Search Engine Optimization.
• The Bing algorithm will very quickly see a number of core upgrades as a result of Microsoft acquiring the Yahoo! technologies. I would expect their crawling to become much more aggressive with the help of the Yahoo crawling engine, which has historically been very quick and very thorough. How this will affect the generally predictable Bing algorithm remains to be seen.
• What’s going to happen to Yahoo!’s great tools like the Site Explorer, and Pipes? Hopefully these won’t change, as they are incredibly useful – but I wouldn’t be surprised to see an eventual rebranding.
• When combined with Yahoo, Bing will have a far more major portion of the search market under their control. This makes an investigation into the Bing algorithms and peculiarities far more interesting.

What this means for PPC:

• It appears that tools and markets will be consolidating under (unfortunately) the Microsoft tool set. On the up side, PPC ads on Bing get almost twice as much click-through as Google, so an expanded market of high click-through ads may make non-Google paid advertising much more valuable.

This is a major market shift in online search, and how the market will ultimately be affected is troublesome to predict. As a premier Canadian internet marketing firm, 6S Marketing is committed to staying on top of emerging trends and marketplace shifts such as this, and we’ll continue to post on the subject as new details emerge, and as research into Bing search engine algorithms advances.