How will the Yahoo and Google merger affect SEO?

Posted by John

February 14, 2008

I mean “How will the Yahoo and Microsoft merger affect SEO“. Guess the title was a Fruedian Slip. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I heard about it last week.

Personally, I don’t believe Live.com + Yahoo.com > Google.com. I just don’t see it. Yahoo’s search is stale and no one uses Live. One benefit to SEO is that it’s easy to rank in Live. If Microsoft moves this philosophy to Yahoo, that will be good for SEO Pros. If the reverse occurs, that will be the end of Live.

What does Live offer to Yahoo?

Live shopping ranks pretty high and can help Yahoo shopping rank even higher
Yahoo search content is old and out of date. Live can offer fresh content due to a focus on inbound links
Live is strong in Europe
Capital – Microsoft has a bunch of money. Bill has billions of dollars burning a hole in his pocket.

What does Yahoo offer to Live?

Yahoo News is the highest ranking online news source
Yahoo can follow 301 redirects better than LIVE can (really…it’s a pretty simple concept)
Yahoo gets more page views than any other site.
YPN is a good competitor to Adsense, if it ever gets out of beta
Yahoo is strong in Japan
Yahoo is a better-known search brand than Live

Can Microsoft use it’s 800 pound marketing guerrilla to push Yahoo higher than Google?

I think, in time, Microsoft could reach number one in search. What it has to do is just Make Google spend a bunch of money to try and beat it. Microsoft has more capital and more capital potential than Google. If Google was forced to spend 900mil or more to fight Microsoft, where would that leave Google?

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