And then there were two: Microsoft – Yahoo! Search Deal at SMX West 2010

With the approval of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal by EU regulators, search engine marketers will soon be working in a new landscape. In western Europe where Google dominates with about 90% of the market, it’s tempting to react to the deal with a big yawn.

Yet Yahoo! often has a bigger impact on our search marking than we might like to acknowledge. For many, Yahoo, through its Site Explorer and the Yahoo Search Boss / Site Explorer APIs , is a primary source of competitive backlink data. And who among us doesn’t perform a few searches in Yahoo to benchmark the quality of Google’s results?

For paid search practitioners, the consolidation of three PPC / Keyword Advertising platforms down to two (Google & Bing) will certainly reduce operational and training costs. In some countries it will make the choice to expand beyond just Google much easier to justify. Yet Bing’s adCenter PPC service is currently limited to the US, Canada, the UK& France. What will happen to the other 30 countries served by Yahoo today?

On the web measurement front, Yahoo Web Analytics is the primary economic alternative to Google’s hegemony. Microsoft has dabbled around in this area, having relaunched DeepMetrix Live Stats as adCenter Analytics, but they later shutdown the service.

While Microsoft’s commitment to search, and the web in general, seems to wax and wane, they might be really serious this time. Indeed, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will join noted Search Engine Analyst Danny Sullivan for a Keynote Chat next week at the Search Marketing Expo conference SMX West 2010. This will be Ballmer’s first address to the search marketing industry and I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

Also next week at SMX West, I’ll take a look at some of the implications of the Bing – Yahoo deal, aiming to provide tips on how to start preparing for the post Yahoo – Bing merger despite the many uncertainties. If you’ll be at SMX, catch my presentation on Thursday at the Microsoft + Yahoo: What’s It All Mean? session. If you’re interested in international issues, be sure to catch my presentation on Multilingual and Multinational domain and URL issues during the Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Technical SEO Tactics session on Wednesday.

Hope to see you at SMX West!

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• Search engine detection in Microsoft adCenter Analytics

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