Google has sold Performics, the SEO company it acquired in its purchase of DoubleClick last year. Performics was sold to the French digital marketing firm Publicis for an undisclosed amount. Owning Performics put Google in a classic conflict of interest position, one that had been called by search marketing firms and blogs since the DoubleClick deal was announced in April 2007. DoubleClick is primarily a display advertising company which had itself acquired Performics to bolster its online advertising offerings. The sale gives Publicis an initial, albeit large, footprint in the search marketing marketplace.
In a similar vein, TimeWarner is said to be ready to dump its underperforming division AOL as quickly as possible. TimeWarner and AOL were merged in 2000 in what was at that time the biggest financial deal in business history. AOL actually bought TimeWarner however, weeks after the merger, the bottom fell out of the tech-stock market. The deal was based mostly on AOL shares. AOL’s value and thus the value of the deal was, almost overnight, worth a fraction of the original amount. That put TimeWarner back in the dominant seat and it has virtually ignored AOL ever since.
Since it draws most of its results from Google’s database, search engine optimizers have not paid a lot of attention to it either. For search marketers, AOL represents a radically underutilized network. AOL still draws a fairly significant number of visitors and is considered the actual #4 search engine behind Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Under the right ownership, AOL might stand a chance to become a much stronger player however observers expect it to be bought by Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft.
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