Everybody’s talking about it – the prospective merger between Microsoft and Yahoo; the consolidation of the old-world mafia-style industrialist with their history of bully-tactics and the hip, café late drinking, laptop-slinging silicon valley-ites of the Yahoo brand.  This prospective merger could bring about change, a major power-shift from the “Big 3” search engines that we see today, with Yahoo and MSN living under the wide-encompassing shadow of Google, to the search competition coming to two distinct heads. Call it Yahoo-soft, Micro-hoo or whatever you want; if this merger takes place – the SEO marketplace will change, without a doubt.

Truth be told, in the USA at least, Google is the very definition of search – so much so that the branded search and media advertising conglomerate has become its own verb in the techno-speak of internet users for the last several years.  In addition to that, Google has a stronghold on nearly 66% of all searches performed in the USA as of December 2007 according to Hitwise.  Needless to say, catering to what Google requires for a search engine friendly website is of the utmost importance if you want a taste of the award winning apple pie here in the good old USA.

And, Google doesn’t just mildly dominate the other major engines; the search mogul overpowers the lesser-used, yet still wildly popular, search engines like the world’s strongest man playing tug-of-war with the local boy-scout troop.  It’s a good effort on MSN’s and Yahoo’s part, sure.   At the end of the day, though, there is no real competition here - at least when you’re looking at the raw data.

Yahoo and MSN (Microsoft) combined account for less than half of the search engine user base that Google does on a monthly basis – an impressive, yet not really competitive, 27% of the total search volume.

Now, when you think of things in terms as of how things are now – Google is the supreme ruler, and website owners that care about SEO and better rankings through natural search should be “bowing down”, so to speak, and kissing the feet of the internet king.   Sure, optimizing your website for Yahoo and even MSN is important – but these two engines cannot deliver the sheer number of visitors to your website that Google can; theoretically anyway. 

So, what’s going to happen to the “Big 3” if the Yahoo-Microsoft deal goes through?  Will this make things easier for website owners, where they will only have two major search engines to contend with in terms of SEO?  Will Yahoo Search remain intact and a separate entity from MSN Search keeping their ranking algorithms and thus search engine results separate? Maybe the number 4 search company, Ask, will rise up and grab enough of the market to become a significant contender in the search market?  Right now – this is all up in the air and until the deal is sealed – it’s all speculation.

Whatever happens, though, expect some changes to take place this year in the SEO community.