Question is…why do Microsoft want Yahoo!? Well, everybody knows of the rivalry between Google and Microsoft and Google have moved into what many have assumed is an unassailable lead in the search market. But it’s not all about search. Yahoo have the popular, but distinquished photo sharing site; Flickr and also their own reliable webmail program and many forget that these guys were performing Search when Google was still a high school project! Recent years though have shown the paid search of Yahoo to be not only unreliable but also less profitable and Yahoo had recently issued a sort of profits warning and board members had walked. Last summers UK Paid Search algorithm and technology update saw many a loyal YSM! paid search supporter walk to Google where advertising costs are now closer and volumes a lot stronger.

If, and it is still a big if, Microsoft were to take on Yahoo!, we would have a Search Media empire which could seriously take on Google…if the right management was put in place to mould the new combined company into a streamlined and concentrated effort. Yahoo Search Marketing’s (YSM!) customer service is crap in the UK (fellow Brits using the service will be nodding their heads at this stage) and MSN have had a tendency to over engineer their search efforts much to the amusement of the boys and girls at Google, so £22 Billion would be an awful lot of money to waste just to scare Google for a month or two….

Try this one out. I didn’t hear the first time so had to play back 2 or 3 times : Moan my IP

“Think of the best brand names!” Ok, there was Mars Bar (I’d just had one at break), the biro I was writing with…er ‘BIC’, Hoover, Kodak (on a roll now…), basically all the big names in that pre-Internet generation era. The teacher then pointed something rather obvious out. The names we’d shouted out and which he’d written on the blackboard as we did so were all meaningless in their own right. Only a good brand/advertising/association made them what they were. What was Kodak before they sold camera film or BIC before they sold razor blades and biros?

Of course, post Internet generation we have a whole new era of brands, and online brands as well but also more noticeably brands which specifically target kids. Ask a kid what a PS3 or Wii is and if you don’t get the correct reply he/she is either telling a fib or been on another planet. In fact kids love brand association. Nike are cool, all the biggest sports stars where their gear but what happened to Reebok? They are bouncing back but along with Puma (who have now made a good return to form) they made a spectacular fall from grace in the early 1990’s despite their designs being very similar to rivals Nike and Adidas. All that could have separated them was brand endorsements and slick advertising for which Nike in particular must be congratulated.

I wonder what the names shouted out from class would be if the teacher asked the same question today. Allegedly Google is now one of the worlds best known brands and then of course we have brands associated to one-off events like the infamous London 2010 logo which has caused so much controversy. Lot’s of people also mention or associate the ‘double o’ use in Internet brands: Google, Yahoo, Froogle (now gone) etc… I bet if you made up a ‘double o’ name and did a street survey asking what that brand ‘did’ most people would associate it with the web. See!? Even brand types have a brand!

In short, a brand is soooooo important to the success or not of a business that larger business have whole Brand departments. I worked in the City of London a number of years ago for a large UK bank and sure enough, there was a room full of post grad students sitting around and mulling over whether the logo should be on the left or the right and hunting down offenders who were so evil as to alter the size or aspect of the Bank logo on a publication of any kind. Probably not a good example but striking the right image begins with the first advert, click or sound. How clever were ‘Pentium’ with their little ditty? I probably couldn’t draw their logo but I sure as can hum their ditty which appears on every mention of their products on TV.

If you’re starting a new venture, consider brand first and foremost as the marketing war starts there.

So, what’s the problem? Well to be honest, it’s a bit rich coming from Google because at the end of the day, their paid for advertising business model is built on the fundamental principles of linking to sites through textual advertising. What’s annoyed the boys and girls at Google HQ is the apparent attempts to undermine their algorithm using these techniques.

But how do Google recognise a ‘paid for link’? Good question. How can they? We think it’s no coincidence that Google have actively increased their exposure and opportunities for webmasters to ‘grass’ on such sites either selling or benefiting from paid links, but is this all Google have? Having looked through Google best practice pages earlier today, we see that they don’t entirely want to destroy the paid link marketplace, but suggest this:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file