Is This Ethical? Microsoft AKA MSN Live Search is partnering with another search marketing firm, The Search Agency which will offer SEO and Paid Search Marketing services. Microsoft is the parent company of aQuantive, which owns Avenue A Razorfish a major paid search company.

Combine this with Microsoft’s adManager which manages paid search and resells Ask.com Sponsored Listings, and Microsoft seems to have a fairly broad selection of search marketing services available.

Microsoft isn’t the only one offering SEO. As a result of Google acquiring DoubleClick, Google also acquired Performics, one of the most popular SEO companies.

A major search engine owning an SEO firm seems to be a conflict of interest in my opinion. These SEO companies would have a huge advantage obtaining potential clients over their competition, with Google and Microsoft in their back pocket.

Google and MSN may or may not give away trade secrets to their SEO companies, but you can be sure they will be the first to know of any algorithm changes before they happen.

Seeing the benefit of paid search, search engines are now seeing dollar signs in the opportunity to upsell a profit heavy SEO package.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 4:45 pmand is filed under Internet Marketing(t) , Search Engine Marketing(t) . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.