Yahoo and Microsoft Reach Deal on Search
Today Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year partnership agreement in their search engine business. Under this new partnership, Microsoft’s Bing will power Yahoo’s search function. Bing has been greeted with much praise for the quality of its algorithm since it was launched with a huge marketing campaign earlier this year. In addition to powering Yahoo’s search engine, Microsoft will also provide its AdCenter solution as the single ad sales platform for PPC ads on both, Yahoo and Bing. AdCenter is widely seen as the superior solution when compared to Yahoo’s Panama (Yahoo Search Marketing).
In the immediate future, ie the next 18 months, this deal will have little effect on advertisers, since the deal has to await approval from anti-trust regulators before going into effect. In the long run, however, the benefits of this partnership will be felt by all advertisers. With the new partnership in place, the marketplace for PPC ads will be more balanced, although Google will likely remain the dominant player. In addition, managing your PPC campaigns across all three search engines will become easier, less time consuming and more efficient. This deal offers some great opportunities to law firms who have not advertised on Bing (and Yahoo) in the past.
In addition to the effect this deal will have on PPC managers and the online advertising industry in general, a huge impact will be felt by SEOs. Take a quick look and compare the organic results you receive for any given search query on Yahoo and Bing. Your site might be on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a given query on Yahoo but not on Bing. The full effects on SEOs resulting from this deal are still unclear. It is clear, however, that Bing’s webmaster tools are suddenly a requirement for all SEO managers. Especially small and new law firms can benefit and improve their rankings as a result of this deal.
As additional reading on this subject, I’m recommending the SEOmoz blog, which outlines the “Top 10 Things the Microsoft/Yahoo Deal Changes for SEO”.
Naturally, the AdVolt Legal team will be happy to answer any questions you might have and provide you with assistance in signing up with AdCenter and Bing’s webmaster tools.
One Response 
Leave a Reply 
AdVolt Legal offers its clients several years of both online advertising and legal industry experience. The legal marketing company was founded by Fabian Ahmadi and Crystal Perkins who respectively spent several years working in the legal and online advertising (SEO, SEM) industries. The two decided to merge their passion and talents to build a company devoted to providing online legal marketing solutions for small and medium size law firms. Our name, AdVolt Legal, epitomizes an important goal of our legal marketing company: to create powerful ads for the legal market. AdVolt Legal understands that operating a successful legal practice requires great legal skills as well as business skills. As such, we are committed to providing you with premium online legal marketing solutions, including SEO and PPC advertising, to help you grow your practice. 
Hi Fabian! I just wanted to comment on your article about the partnership between Yahoo and Bing. I’ve read up some more, indluding http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx
To me it seems as if this deal is somewhat assymetrical in that it provides Microsoft with long term gains, whereas Yahoo only benefits from short term gains. It appears that the stock market doesn’t look at the partnership very favorably either.
What are your thoughts on Yahoo’s future?