Microsoft Buying Yahoo For Real
Back in June of 07 I wrote a post Ugly Rumor Microsoft Buying Yahoo Again which talked about Yahoo being worth 80 billion. Microsoft just offered 44 billion for Yahoo which is quite a bit less than what the pundits said in May of 2007. One reason is that Yahoo’s stock has been steadily declining for the last three years. Even so, they still pull in 40 billion a year in paid advertising. My post and a subsequent conversation on Digg talked about why this is a smart move by Microsoft.
As a search engine optimization engineer, I am hoping that this deal goes down, since both Live and Yahoo have always been much easier for me to obtain organic placement than Google. Even though I have had a lot of success in Google, having a Yahoo-Live hybrid engine that can compete with Google in the search space, is a good thing for SEO people, especially SEO people like me that use social network marketing as a tool for organic placement.
In fact Yahoo is now putting video in their natural SERP’s. Live has already been doing a lot of “new media” indexing. The majority of experts are staying focused on the paid advertising aspect of this proposed deal. That is why Microsoft is making the offer. The ramifications of a Live-Yahoo merger on the organic side have yet to be discussed in any detail. My feeling is that this will be very good for SEO people and we should be crossing our fingers that the deal happens. Any competition to Google is a benefit for us. If they continue to own the search space, than they will continue to do whatever they want, like make war on paid links. With stiff competition, Google will have to think twice before pissing off their advertisers and Adsense publishers.
WebProNews didn’t feel that Microsoft would buy Yahoo, and unlike me, don’t feel that the deal would be worth it to Microsoft. It was actually their article on May 12th that prompted me to write mine. Even though I am not a big fan of Microsoft, and I feel that they have missed the boat on the Internet since day 1, this is a really good move for them. It gives them what Google wants so bad, to be a one stop portal that takes care of general Internet user’s needs.
These posts explain why all this is important:
- The Changing Face Of Google – Universal Search is explained in this article.
- Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing - SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized social network marketing is covered in this post.
- RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained - RSS syndication is explained here.
- RSS Syndication Services FeedBurner – this post explained how FeedBurner works. It was written prior to Google’s purchase of FeedBurner which is talked about in my Web 2.0 Podcast. Also of note is the updated post about FeedBurner RSS to Email service.
I will stay on top of this story.
