The day has finally arrived. In July last year, we first announced the imminent Microsoft and Yahoo! merger. Today, antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe cleared Microsoft to take over Yahoo!’s search business, without any imposing restrictions on the partnership. This MSFT / Yahoo! partnership has been named “Search Alliance”.
In our opinion, this is a great opportunity for our clients as it will level out the playing field, and finally presents a challenge for Google. We have been disappointed with Yahoo!’s differences in understanding standard industry terms when they decided to go with advanced and standard match, instead of broad, phrase and exact match. Microsoft AdCenter remains consistent with industry standard definitions, which will certainly help our paid advertisers. We feel clients will benefit from additional volume, relevance, quality and increased conversions due to more robust control on the backend and increased transparency. Microsoft, after all, is a technology company.
How will this impact the content network for these two partners? Between the two of them, they have the largest trafficked content networks on the web. Separately, they have both failed in being able to offer a solid product to advertisers. I am hoping that this combined effort will increase the opportunity in that area.
How will this impact SEO? Will they hold more weight now? What are your thoughts?