What are the SEO Implications of a Yahoo Owned by Micorsoft?

A while ago, trying to describe the concept of Search Engine Optimisation to a friend, I hit upon this analogy:

“It’s like Isaac Newton trying to calculate the exact force of gravity. Google’s algorithm is like gravity, and all the SEOs are like Newton, trying to figure the effect of this algorithm on their client’s sites. However, you have to imagine that God keeps screwing with Newton by changing the force of gravity on a daily basis just for the fun of it.”

In the world of Search Engine Optimisation, Google can afford to be seen as a somewhat malevolent force – toying with its index at will – seeing as (according to Hitwise) it has captured over 60% of global search volume. Its closest rival, Yahoo! accounts for less than half this amount, and thus Google has ensured a steady stream of SEOs scrambling to unravel Google’s (constantly changing) algorithm and achieve the holy trinity of: 1) high Page Rank, leading to 2) a high rank on the search engine results page (SERP) and thus 3) higher AdSense earnings.

However, this could all be set to change with the possibility of Microsoft buying out Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! has resisted such a bid in the past, Microsoft is offering shareholders a considerable premium for their shares in the struggling company, which has recently suffered job cuts and falling profits. So far discussion has mostly been regarding the effects on the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) industry. However, at this point we’ve seen little discussion on the SEO implications of this potential take-over.

The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN) account for almost 95% of global search volume. As mentioned previously, Google accounts for approximately 60% of searches. However, the combined forces of Yahoo! and MSN total almost 35% of search volume, making it a worthy rival and perhaps encouraging SEOs to optimise for their search as well as – or instead of – Google’s. Microsoft has realised this potential, offering Yahoo! shareholders a hefty premium (around 60% above Yahoo!’s market value) to take control of Yahoo!’s search engine.

Yahoo! themselves have a record of buying out other search engines, including Overture, AllTheWeb, Inktomi and AltaVista. Prior to 2004, Yahoo! used Google’s index as part of their own search functions before developing their own index. Furthermore, Inktomi (one of the companies acquired by Yahoo!) once powered MSN search, until Microsoft to develop its own search engine. Both of these events happened in 2004, which happens to be just before Google released its Jagger update – this may explain some of the fundamental differences between Google and the Yahoo! and MSN search engines.

So what might we expect from an MSN-owned Yahoo! search engine results page? During our SEO research, we have found the following consistent patterns between Yahoo!, MSN and Google:

• Lower Google PR pages that would normally not appear on the front pages of Google will appear on Yahoo! and MSN. This would suggest that both sites have a different metric of quality and relevance than Google

• More emphasis on volume and less on relevance for links in Yahoo! and MSN, especially in MSN. This is possibly because Google developed its Jagger updates which actively targeted linking behaviors like mass reciprocal linking after both companies had started developing their own indexes and already had a large amount of data to base their work on

• Google will give more weight to a diverse linking profile, where inbound links are directed towards different pages within your site

• Google tends to fluctuate and update faster, and contains a lot of location specific information, for instance providing Google maps in SERPs. They have also suggested that they may include new SERP elements such as time-lines in the near future

• Yahoo! and MSN are more susceptible to aggressive link building campaigns, as Google filters links over time and may exclude (“sandbox”) domains with unnatural link patterns. Similarly, Google tends to filter a page for keywords or phrases that are used excessively

• Google gives the most value to factors such as site age and geographical factors. However, Google has also been criticized for allowing older domains with “spammy” links to rank well. As a result, it generally takes longer to rank in Google than the other search engines

Due to Google’s perceived bias towards old, established sites, it seems possible that newer sites targeting competitive search terms might abandon optimising for Google altogether and instead focus their efforts on achieving a higher rank in the MSN/Yahoo! index, thus loosening Google’s current stranglehold on the SEO and SEM market. In turn, searchers unhappy with results returned by a Google search could be confident that the MSN/Yahoo! product would return markedly different results, due to the variation in the quality and relevance metrics. If Microsoft successfully acquires Yahoo! I suspect we will see a lot of smaller, newer businesses optimising for MSN/Yahoo! rather than solely focusing on Google. This could potentially create more diversity in the search engine world as we see older, stronger businesses at the top of the Google index and newer, more active businesses gaining a greater edge in Yahoo! and MSN.

Sources:

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/08/us_july_search_volume_numbers.html

http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/

http://business.smh.com.au/microsoft-offers-50b-for-yahoo/20080202-1pmp.html

Tags: Google, microsoft, optimisation, Search Engine, SEO, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.