This morning the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! was all over the technology news portals. Nowhere near the gravity of the initial buyout proposal last year, this news should be seen as encouraging by the SEO’s of the world and below I’ll tell you why.
Historically, Microsoft’s search technology, be it MSN, Live or Bing has been significantly more organic than Google or Slurp. Meaning, one could get significantly higher ranking without an investment of time or resources building inbound links to the website. The speed at which one can generate ranking [in Bing] is unparalleled to that of Google, RSS news feeds being the exception to that rule.
For us SEO Experts, this announcement could mean more opportunity to get improved natural/organic search engine optimization results from now 30% of the search market while we’re waiting for Google to discover and qualify the link building efforts we invest in to get their blessing for higher Google SERPS ranking.
Many of us have fell in love with the keyword tools in MSN AdCenter and I’ve finally become acclimated to their AdCenter Editor. If Yahoo! is going to be powering the paid search platform, does that mean my awesome ROI, CTR, and Quality will be erased forever and I’ll be stuck in Yahoo!’s quirky Quality Index algorithm?
If you didn’t know already, Yahoo! assigns Quality Index at the ad group level, rather than at the keyword level (the way AdWords does). They also only offer two settings: precise and everything else, where AdCenter (like Google) has allowed us to match keywords with broad, phrase, and exact match queries.
Only time will tell what’s actually going to happen. But rest assured that I’ll be every search engine marketing event to pick the brains of those Yahoo!’s that our customers invest ad dollars with to get more business from search. It’s my hope that the two giants will put their heads together to get (what my daughter sings all the time) “the best of both worlds” in terms of better natural and paid search technology.
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