What Does the Proposed Purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft Mean for SEO?

The big news in the world wide web is the proposed purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft for a stunningly large amount of money. If you consider obtaining organic search engine rankings part of your marketing, the question is what this means to you.

44 billion dollars. Any way you cut it, that is a lot of mulla. If the deal falls through, it appears that Microsoft could seriously consider buying a few states. Regardless, this must be a huge event for the web with so much money on the line, right? Yes and no.

There is little secret that the efforts of Microsoft on the web have pretty much met with bleak results. The MSN Live search engine is weak and the total traffic controlled is miniscule compared to Google and even Yahoo. In short, this deal should be viewed as a "if you can't beat them, buy them" effort by Microsoft. Yahoo may be losing out to Google, but it is still a much stronger presence than Microsoft on the web. The question, of course, is will a combined effort do anything to slow Google down? Your guess is as good as mine, but I doubt it.

From an SEO point of view, there proposed purchase means little. If Microsoft was able to finalize the purchase tomorrow and take over Yahoo, it would take probably a year or two before we noticed any significant changes. As you can probably guess, the deal is going to take much longer to get through regulatory agencies and the like, so three to five years is a more likelihood for seeing any impact on the search engines.

Ah, but what about the long term? What if the deal is approved and Microsoft eventually takes over Yahoo? Will Google be running for cover? Not likely. Nobody is entirely sure what Microsoft will do with Yahoo, but many feel the deal would result in MSN.com and the Live search engine being rolled into Yahoo in some manner.

In theory, this will result in Yahoo picking up a bunch of new users. These new users would increase its percentage of traffic controlled compared to Google and, supposedly, give it more leverage to turn deals against the interest of Google. This theory assumes, however, that all of the current MSN users would start using Yahoo. There is no evidence that this is true. A more likely scenario is the traffic would split up between the two search engines.

Ultimately, nobody really knows what the impact of a Microsoft purchase of Yahoo would mean to SEO. Heck, Yahoo hasn't even agreed to the deal! What we do know, however, is that if it goes forward, any impact probably will not be felt for years, so don't get to wrapped up in it.

Sam Alucard is with AlucardSEOServices.com - providers of SEO services.