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Google stock had hardly experienced the investors’ darling’s first ever bloodbath, losing as much as 7 percent in one fell swoop after it transpired that last year’s sales expectations weren’t met, when Yahoo! surged by an unprecedented 48.75 percent following Microsoft’s friendly bid of $44.6bn today.

So will Yahoo! actually bite? Currently, this is anybody’s guess and it will probably take good time yet for the haggling to get over and done with either which way. It’s not too long ago that most industry insiders would have ruled out this possibility entirely, seeing that the two companies’ chemistry simply never matched, well reflected by what Rhys Blakely has so aptly worded here:

eager to retain his young Turk credentials, Mr Yang, now the Yahoo! chief executive, is said actively to dislike Microsoft products, and to go out of his way to avoid using them.

But let’s assume for a minute that this deal will indeed come off – what can an SEO expect in that case? The single response that comes to mind immediately is: Not much, except perhaps for some loss of (obviously unsubstantiated) futile hope. Some specialist niche markets aside, Microsoft’s Live-formerly-known-as-MSN-Search engine has merely featured as an also ran in the world of SEO for years now.

Yes, you did find some hope sound bytes floating about here and there on occasion: how maybe Microsoft would get their act together some day soon, to really push back the ubiquitous Google behemoth; old timers musing about the irony of discovering their entirely unexpected newly awakened love for Micro$oft after Google left no doubts concerning their true corporate ambitions; how maybe, maybe Microsoft might fuse their search operation with some other minor player (heck, even Ask might have been a likely candidate) to create something entirely innovative; etc.

So all we would really lose is a Live-that-never-gained-serious-significance-anyway. Whether Yahoo! will stay the same, is, of course, quite another story. We wouldn’t put it past M$ to botch this particular job like so many others in the past. Only time will tell – but as SEOs we’ll have to stay on guard, that much, at least, is for sure.

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