The marketing community is abuzz with talk about Google's $3.1B bid for DoubleClick.  Ironically, Google's biggest deal to date will probably have little direct impact on Google's search marketing business.  Rather, DoubleClick gives Google a firm position in the fast growing online display advertising business.  Google's previous attempt to break into this business via their Google Site Targeting product met with mixed success.  The DoubleClick acquisition makes Google an instant player in the display advertising space. 

In terms of the impact on Search, there are two potential outcomes of the Google/DoubleClick deal that may be of interest to search marketers.  First, Google has pushed aggressively to gain insight into advertisers' back-end data in an effort to both better price search inventory and build out Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) based offerings.  DoubleClick's data would be extremely valuable to Google in these pursuits.  Second, the merger of users' historical search behavior data with DoubleClick's vast media network could create the opportunity for behavioral targeting options.  Such an offering would be similar to Yahoo!'s current Impulse Targeting product, which has proven very effective for advertisers. 

How the potential acquisition will play out is still unclear.  Microsoft and others have challenged the deal, claiming it gives Google too much power in the online advertising space.  Privacy advocates, too, may take issue with an entity that has visibility into so many aspects of users' online behavior.  One thing is clear, Google is moving aggressively to buck their status as a one-trick pony, and the DoubleClick deal is their biggest move yet to break out of the search marketing mold. 

In the world of Search Engine Optimization, the Google/DoubleClick deal last week was only secondary to other Google news.  Matt Cutts, Google Engineer and chief “search engine spam” fighter, again came out publicly in his blog to denounce the selling of links.  In fact, he went so far as to introduce a method for people who suspect sites to be selling links for SEO purposes to report those sites directly to Google.  This “snitch program” has led to heated discussion within the comments on Matt’s post (over 500 of them by the morning of 4/25), as well as in other forums and blogs referenced at the Search Engine Roundtable (originally reported on 4/16).

AA|RF SEO Engineer Sean Stahlman feels Google shouldn’t be a factor in deciding whether to buy or not to buy links.  Instead, he recommends looking for the value of the link in terms of driving qualified visitors to a page.  He suggests: “If considering purchasing a paid link first ask: is it relevant? Turn off the Google toolbar (which measures the oft-desired PageRank of a particular Web page) and evaluate the following criteria:  Is the Web page at least somewhat related and will it potentially drive traffic?”  Other considerations should include “Are the other outbound links on the page themed or are they promoting various other industries, especially the “PPC’s” (Porn, Pills, Casino's)?  So in terms of helping to build links to a website, if they are only available via purchase, it becomes a simple business decision, ideally unclouded by dreams of high rankings or PageRank. 

Another factor to consider is “Does the website request money directly for the link, or does it advocate making a donation to the site in return for their help in promoting the targeted website with a link?” This may seem like semantics, but it can signal a big difference in intent.  Those actually selling the links are potentially more likely to be doing it for SEO purposes, while those providing them as a benefit for contributors could simply be doing that.  This leads nicely to a statement by Andy Powers, an SEO Analyst that feels that, “There are too many varieties of paid links to devalue only the SEO-focused subset in a scalable way.”  As another Engineer, Brian Cosgrove, predicts: “Matt is moving link-networks to the shadows.  Future paid links will simply be that much less transparent and worth that much more.” 

Google Rules the World? -  They do according to the San Francisco Chronicle.  The newspaper was referring to two reports announced this week, one by comScore (no official source yet) which states that Google is the most visited site in the world, and the other by MilwardBrown which reported Google is now the number one brand in the world, jumping ahead of General Electric and Microsoft.  These stories were covered at Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable.

ASK.com to Provide Contextual Advertising – Ask.com’s sponsored listings program is launching its own contextual program, allowing site owners to host blocks of contextually relevant ads, similar to the Google (AdSense) and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Publisher Network) products which offer the same service. AA|RF will comment on the new advertising option in coming weeks, but initial coverage can be found at ClickZ.

Yahoo! Announces Partnership with PayPal – Yahoo! made some news of their own this past week, announcing a partnership with PayPal.  This will “enable people to checkout faster and with greater security when they make online purchases,” according to Yahoo!’s Tim Mayer.  Many feel this is Yahoo!’s answer to Google Checkout, as discussed here and here.