With the pending merger of Yahoo and MSN’s search engines there is a lot of talk about the importance of a strong competitor for Google, who has well over half of the search market cornered. How does the merger affect Google? More importantly, how does it affect Affiliate marketers and clients?

While it seems that Google will continue to dominate, current market share would put the MSN/Yahoo combo around 30-35% of total searches in America. That is a considerable amount that should not be ignored by SEO or PPC managers.

All 3 Platforms have different algorithms for their organic search. From what little information we have so far, much of the new Hybrid engine will be based off the recently re-vamped MSN Live engine, now called Bing! One simple search in Bing will show you the difference in how ads are displayed. Do a little more research and you’ll notice that organic search may yield different results. It is especially important for SEO managers to know the subtle differences in how the engines rank the pages. As an example: Bing and Yahoo give more credit to sub-domains with a searched keyword in them. You might find a sub-page ranking above a home page depending on what keywords you searched with. (*see link below for more tips on SEO management)

Pay Per Click affiliates need to pay attention to the new search giant as well. Most Publishers test out new campaigns in Yahoo or MSN before setting up the more costly Google Ad Words campaigns. Considering that the usual CPC is cheaper than Google it is probably a good idea to start running some more campaigns in Bing! Get yourself familiar with the interface, ad creation and the bidding process. Don’t forget, you get extra space for ad copy and paid search results appear in different spots on the Bing engine than the usual Google style we are all accustomed to seeing. Many industry pros feel the way ads are placed on the Bing search results will make consumers more likely to click on paid links. This could prove to be a major factor when we get more stats on the demographic breakdown of Bing users. If CTR (click through rates) are truly higher this may also be the time to try and take control of certain broad term keywords before the mass migration occurs.

MSN has pumped millions into advertising the new engine over the lat few months with the promise of an easier more exact search. While they have only seen a slight increase in overall traffic, there is no reason to believe that it will not eventually make an impact. As MSN begins to partner with current Yahoo partners and build the new engine into internet explorer (and most likely another round of advertising) we should see search volume in the new giant increase. Should be fun to watch this develop!

For more information on the merger visit the official website:

http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

For more tips on optimizing SEO for MSN or Yahoo check out this great blog from Winning the Web: http://www.winningtheweb.com/microsoft-bing-yahoo-deal-seo.php

-Dan Spivak

TheSmartestSearch.com