What if Microsoft did acquire Yahoo! What would this do to the SEO world?
Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:31 Published Date Hits: 483
Search engine optimisers and search engine marketers who earn their money this way know that when it comes to the web Microsoft was such a late starter that everything it does in this direction is ill-thought out, buggy, difficult to use, overly corporate in approach and so grandiose that it looks good only from a distance and then only when viewed with a squint.
The details of Microsoft’s web activities are always bedevilled by exactly the kind of lack of focus that you would expect from a faceless corporate giant with its gaze firmly fixed upon some distant horizon and an eager desire to get there fast.
Take the hugely expensive revamping of hotmail for instance which turned into one of the biggest flops in the company’s project development history, until Vista came along that is, with tens of thousands of customers demanding the old interface and the settings it offered back.
Vista is another example and MSN search…erm, well, the sheer difficulty of getting Live Search to index anything properly speaks volumes about the user-friendliness of MS web products. Sure, MSN did Ms Dewy but that is a quirky thing for the fanboys and was built on a whim to gain kudos for a company that was beginning to seriously suffer in the cool stakes.
All of this leads us back to the original question: what would happen if Microsoft took over Yahoo! in an aggressive takeover as it is threatening to do?
Well, in the short-term Yahoo’s share of the search engine market would pass to Microsoft and it would create a merger which would have a truly sizeable piece of the search engine pie. But that is only short-term. In SEO nothing stands still for longer than a week and the bet is that Microsoft would not be content to let things be this way. It would want to merge its Live Search technology with Yahoo’s and take the insights gained to create a new, corporate-driven package that would, in its mind, rival Google’s encroachment in the corporate world.
Here is what Microsoft does not get: Google does not care about corporations. The search engine giant’s business culture is geared towards the individual user of the web and their needs and those corporations that buy into it do so only because they are driven by individuals who have nothing but good experiences to share using Google applications.
Microsoft on the other hand speaks corporate speak. The individual is a nuisance because he simply “does not get” Microsoft’s vision of where technology should be heading and wants to do his own luddite thing. This would start to filter to the SEO side with sites becoming harder to index, greater use of Black Hat SEO by unethical SEOs eager to drive traffic from the MSN/Yahoo! merger (MSN still counts links as part of PageRank and serves a site with many higher than one without, which simply would encourage link swapping and link building and the old link-selling practise which Google has all but stamped out).
The SEO world would see a resurgence of Black Hat, questionable practises (which would ban sites from Google) but as they delivered traffic from an almost equal segment of the search market would that matter?
This would be a case of Yin and Yang. Google would, inevitably perhaps, tighten even further its indexing algorithm, delivering more relevant search results, heuristically, faster than even before and Microsoft (with the embedded Yahoo! technology) would clank along producing marketing campaigns that worked, embedding search engine options in its browser and every Corporate package it sold and forgetting that the end user is me and you.
A Microsoft/Yahoo! merger would make SEO harder simply because shady practises would increase and organic traffic from Google would be harder to get. It would make SEO even more satisfying (provided you succeeded of course) and would leave a suddenly decreasing (and irrelevant) slice of the search market in Microsoft’s hands.
