It has been made public as of now that Google are definitely against the SOPA act, and they definitely have just reason to be. Although they are with the SOPA movement, you won’t be sent to a black screen, Google has used their staggering traffic to the best of their ability.

If you log onto Google.com, you will notice at the bottom of the page there is a message from congress which states “Tell congress: Please don’t censor the web”, and by clicking this link, it will take you to another section of Google in which you can sign an online petition to stop SOPA and PIPA, on top of that… information about the two bills are available. More importantly the effects of these bills are explained which is something that is hard to find. Then there is a community section that proves the growing community that are opposing the movements. Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, eBay, PayPal and of course Google, not to mention the countless others who are opposing the censorship of the internet.

The Effects

According to Google, SOPA and PIPA will do more harm than good. This is because it will force internet businesses to closely monitor everything linking to their site and if they are in violation of any new laws according to SOPA and PIPA, then it could potentially mean the end of the business, which will leave a huge number of people jobless.

It would be different if SOPA and PIPA actually worked, according to the big G!, these acts won’t stop online piracy. The regulations written in these bills wont successfully shut down their sites, they will simply transfer them to another domain and continue until they are caught again.

Conclusion

Anyone who works on the internet frequently has had their work stolen and pirated before. Whether you’re a writer or film maker, it happens so often and there is not much we can do about it. We do need a bill or law to prevent online piracy. However we need one that will work and not end up crippling the internet as we know it. This change will have a huge effect on social media and could potentially put a stop to it, not to mention SEO and PPC as the algorithm will be a completely different and most likely biased, and that is if it hasn’t been banned by a government.

Yahoo and Bing have created a search alliance together. This new found partnership enables web masters to manage their PPC campaigns on both search engines, but only from one site. This means that running a campaign on both websites is more convenient than ever.

Step Up

Google is the search giant; there is no dispute about that. However, we all know that Yahoo have been slowly declining and have been in need of a comeback. This alliance could be exactly what Yahoo needs to begin to bring back higher user activity on their site. Especially since Yahoo site explorer went down, which was a tool that displayed incoming links, this tool was heavily used by SEO ‘s around the world. Now the alliance has been formed, this could be Yahoo’s big break.

What The Bing?

The question must be raised, what is in it for Bing? Well the most obvious reason would be a higher volume of search. Although Yahoo is on a downhill slope right now so the search volume required would not be that great. I think there are other reasons for this Alliance. Possibly Yahoo’s tech heads are better with PPC or may have a more technical algorithm than Bing.

Taking On The G!

Since Google is the king of search, I believe this is an attempt for the two engines (Y! + Bing) to team up and group together their current volumes of traffic and make an attempt to beat Google, this will be tough to accomplish straight away, any search engine to take on Google will not receive an instant win. So unless an awesome advance in the industry is made by Yahoo and Bing, then it will be difficult for them to overcome Google and become the top source of information on the web.

Conclusion

It is unlikely that we will be informed the true reason for this alliance. It is most likely an attempt to combat Google but the reason why they are teaming up is much more than we know. Yahoo are most likely part of this to bring themselves back from their decline. However the reasons for Bing to be a part of this alliance are unclear.

SEOs world wide would have been redirected to the dreaded page of the “site explorer update” In a nutshell, this service is no more and we are going to have to find another place to locate a reliable source of backlinks.

We were all told that Yahoo site explorer was going to be closed down at some point, but it has come to a shock to all SEO’s of the world. Such a massively used and reliable tool is now no more.

Yahoo have said that Yahoo search has been merged with Bings’ Webmaster tools. For many toolbars such as SEO Book, this has caused a massive problem. Beforehand, we had the ease of viewing the amount of backlinks a page had, without even having to open up another browser.

What Is Next?

It is fair to say that Yahoo! Are finished and this site explorer integration to Bing was the last step. SEO’s will have to find a new source of information to base their research on, this will prove to be a difficult task, especially because Yahoo was free and provided excellent results. This could lead to many SEO companies having to go down the route of purchasing software which was once not needed but could now be an essential factor of any SEO business.

The integration into Bings’ Webmaster tools could prove to be a good thing, however this may not completely take off because it may be unable to include into a toolbar like it was for Yahoo site explorer. Fingers cross that there is something that can be done on the situation, because SEO’s will be feeling the burn of an essential tool being snatched away.

In the world of search engines the biggest names have constantly battling each other in order to gain the top spot in terms of the number of users of such search engine. This is because the more people that uses their search engine the higher their return of investments, so far Google has been in the forefront of this race to getting search engine users. Google’s battle with the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing became obvious to SEO companies when Microsoft’s Bing has undergone several changes and agreements with other companies which includes the social media giant Facebook and Bing’s second rival Yahoo. The merger of Yahoo with Bing made SEO consultants believe that Google the sole target in this continuing battle.

However in a very rare moment the big three of search engines have set aside, in the meantime, their differences in order to  develop what is dubbed as schema.org. The schema.org initiative from Yahoo, Bing and Google aims to standardise or develop a common set of data which will serve as a universal and common language which will be utilised by all search engines.

The markup data collection will serve as a list of different markups that will be utilised or that can be utilised by SEO specialists in their website in order to organise such website properly and have it displayed on the search engine results page of a search engine. With thousands of markups and snippets of code cropping up every week especially with the development of HTML5 the SEO agencies will be having a difficult time in determining which tags or attributes should be used in order to organise their site data for the efficient crawling and ranking in the search engine results page.

Schema.org therefore can be considered by SEO experts are a collection of SEO friendly attributes and elements which they can utilise in their SEO Campaign.

Yahoo is known as one of the pioneer  in the field of search engine being among the first search engines that emerged during the 90’s and when its long-time rival Google arrived Yahoo only became a constant second in terms of the number of user using the said search engine. During the course of the time another search engine emerged and this is MSN and was later on renamed to Bing, a search engine that is the brain child of Microsoft. With the emergence of these three big players in the field of search  and not to mention also the emergence of other smaller search engines the competition in this field proved to be very tough, despite of all these Google remained to be unmoved from the number one spot.

For several years Yahoo and Bing always comes in second and third respectively which prompted the two companies to band together and enter into a merger agreement with a single goal in mind and that is to topple the search engine giant Google from the top spot. Months after the merger Google still remains to be at the top in terms of the number of internet users share for search engines and the Yahoo-Bing Search engine still remains to be in the second spot. This does not mean however that the merger was futile, according to a search engine marketing agency Efficient Frontier, the Yahoo-Bing merger led to small drops in the click share and spend share and moreover a larger drop in the paid search ad impression for the Yahoo Bing search engine however there was a significant gain reported in terms of the revenue per click area. According to Efficient Frontier Yahoo-Bing search engine has an average revenue per click of about twenty percent which is lower from what Google have gained, but as of the latest report it would show that the Yahoo-Bing search engine have increased in terms of their revenue per click and is now almost the same as what Google has for its revenue per click.

The Google page rank is one of the most sought after web ranking for every SEO company because of the fact that having a page rank would mean that the website is considered to be popular over the web since page ranking is a good indicator of a websites’ popularity. Everytime Google announces updates on their Google Page ranking many SEO experts are scrambling to increase their SEO efforts like gaining quality backlinks in order make it in time for the new Google page rank update. However this page ranking that was patented by Google may be in risk of being phased out that is if Google will not renew the patent of the Google pagerank algorithm. It can be recalled that the patent license that was granted to Google will expire in 2011 and complete expiration of the patent will be implemented in 2017. This would mean therefore that Google will lose its patent on the PageRanking System and that such technology will be open for other search engine companies to utilise it. In case this would happen even Google competitors will be able to integrate within their system such Page Rank Algorithm which would then mean that every SEO consultant will be able to see how their website ranks in a particular standard like the standards of Microsoft, Yahoo and other search engines.

This near transformation to non-exclusive nature of the Google Page Rank system may be the cause or the reason why Google is focusing its efforts heavily on the development of new site features. Among these are Google Caffeine and the instant search results page. According to Google however the company holds a perpetual license to the Page Rank algorithm and that there was an extension done on the exclusivity of the page rank system up to 2011 and at that point such ranking system will become non-exclusive until it expires in 2017.

For so many years Yahoo have been the constant competition of the search engine giant, Google. Yahoo was one of the first search engines and had its share of the number one spot, however when Google emerged the Yahoo search engine was not able to recover. Microsoft on the other hand started as an Operating System company who became ambitious and have been motivated or driven to develop their own search engine, Microsoft have developed the MSN live search engine platform but after several years of being on the bottom three of the primary search engine they have decided to change several things and such change was the birth of Bing which is now Microsoft’s flagship search engine. After several attempts of being number one Microsoft remained to be in the third spot despite financing advertisements for the Bing search engine and the financing of several other endeavours that Microsoft believed to be a traffic-increasing activity, this event led to Yahoo and Bing having to merge. Failing to topple Google from the number one spot Yahoo and Microsoft have entered into an agreement where Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s search engine platform, this is for the purpose of increasing or merging the user share of the two search engine which is hoped to be enough to topple Google. This agreement was implemented only August of this year. With that implementation however came the latest survey from Nielsen showing that Bing have already surpassed Yahoo in the Month of August this is even without the effects of the merger. This would mean therefore that Bing does have the potential to increase users share independently and it is believed that with the merger Bing will gain further in terms of users share, this is an information or event that SEO companies and SEO consultants should therefore not ignore.

Previously, the internet search engine company Yahoo have spent millions of dollars just to prevent a hostile takeover from Microsoft. However recent events that happened have made the two companies to strike a deal that would, as far as they know, benefit both companies especially in their quest to becoming the foremost search engine companies a title which is currently being held by Google who’s got a around 60%-70% internet users share. This ranking or percentage of users share by the search engine giant Google is still at a high level that not even Yahoo and Microsoft can match such percentage of internet users share. It is because of this that Microsoft, with a goal to overtake Google in the number one spot have developed several ways on how to battle Google like changing their MSN search engine to Bing where features of a minimalist design like Google was implemented and other features just like a unique search engine algorithm. Prior to the launching of Bing Microsoft have conducted a massive advertising campaign where they spent millions of dollars. However, despite they marketing strategies Google remained to be steadfast in the number one position.

This is the reason why Microsoft and Yahoo became reintroduced with the idea of combining resources in order to compete with Google head on. This resulted to ten years of resources sharing where Yahoo will be utilising the search engine of Microsoft and because of the number of users from Microsoft and combine that with the total number of Yahoo website visitors then there will be an increase in the internet users share if those two have been combined. Recently, the court has affirmed the Yahoo-Microsoft Deal and have ruled that the merger does not violate any of the anti-trust law this is the reason why Yahoo and Microsoft has to start merging their site’s resources and they are targeting the site to be accomplished by the end of fall this year in order for users to start using and enjoying the services by Yahoo and Microsoft in one.

The search engine pioneer and the search engine giant’s battle of each other is of no secret. Yahoo has been regarded as a pioneer in the search engine industry from being one of the first modern search engines, during its early years and before the launch of Google, Yahoo has been the dominant force in the field of search engine. With the entry however of the now search engine giant, Google, Yahoo has since lagged to second place in terms of internet users’ share. At present Google still dominates the search engine users share taking sixty five percent 65% of the users share while Yahoo is still at second place with around eleven percent. It is because of this constant reign of Google in the first spot that Yahoo started planning out on how to deliver a blow that will topple the search engine giant. Yahoo’s recent strategy was to team up with another of Google’s competitor, Microsoft. With the launch of its new search engine Microsoft hoped to topple Google from first place but it never materialised and that prompted the two search engine companies to enter into a merger that will allow them to utilise each other’s’ resources in order to increase search engine user’s share. Months after the merger Google still is at the top and Yahoo is still at second place a situation that made Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to rethink their strategies, now, indications that Yahoo will battle Google head on are evident.

One of the biggest indication that Yahoo is targeting Google head on in its campaign is the fact that the Yahoo CEO has began to make some changes in the company. Moreover, she has set aside a $100 million which is to be used in her promotional plan, a plan, according to her, that will put Yahoo back into the map and back into the competition.

The battle for the number one spot in terms of users’ share have been escalating since the last weeks of last year, acquisitions of smaller but potential companies have been made and the biggest deal have been forged. All these happened because both Microsoft and Yahoo would like to topple the search engine giant, Google from its number one position which the search engine company is still holding up to today. On the other hand the search engine giant Google have made its own acquisition of different small venture with the goal of maintaining its lead over the two contenders in the search engine field and also to return to the search engine company former employees who have ventured into their personal business.

The biggest merger in terms of internet companies was that between Yahoo and Microsoft but this merger came under fire as there were contentions that such deal was unfair and biased. The complaint reached the U.S. Department of Justice and proceeded to investigate the case. After the investigation was done the U.S. Department of Justice found the deal to be valid as it is beneficial to Microsoft’s Bing. The Department of Justice further contended that since Microsoft will be able to handle the backend of Yahoo searches Bing will have three times the search queries. This will thus enable Bing to increase the speed of its automated learning capacity which would thus enable the search engine to display more accurate and relevant results. This would thus further mean that searchers or users will be able to find what they are looking for the first time around.

With the steady gain in terms of search engine users Bing is now seen as a valid and strong competitor against the search engine giant Google, and with the approval of the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the merger it is clear that Google is being threatened in its hold to the number one position in terms of user share.