Traffic Flow SEO

Just saw an interesting article on CNET about the upcoming deadline looming next week for federal antitrust regulators to approve or challenge Yahoo and Google's controversial search advertising partnership, the search giant has apparently been busy trying to drum up large advertisers to provide public testimonials in support of the deal, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Let me make this perfectly clear - THIS IS NOT A GOOD PARTNERSHIP! Usually I am pretty open-minded and am willing to understand and see both sides of an issue, but in this case there really is only one side. If Yahoo and Google go through with this partnership here is what I see:

- Increased prices for Yahoo ads - one of the main reasons Yahoo gets part of my ad budgets is because its lower costs offset some of my higher priced Google ads - have to use Google for volume.

- Less insight into my ad performance - Google does not share separate performance levels of search partner sites, it just rolls it all up together, so you will no longer have a clear picture on how your Yahoo ads are performing as they have a slightly different search audience.

- Google will no longer have a large search competitor and may not have the incentive to continually update their engine at the current rate and it will become harder to have any discussions with Google over their lack of relevancy within their paid search algorithm since they will really be the only game in town.

The best solution, which I originally did not embrace would be for MSN and Yahoo to merge and/or for Yahoo to buy AOL. So, if you are approached by Google as seen in the TechCrunch article I hope you just say 'no'.