Google to own an SEM & SEO firm

April 18th, 2007

News bouncing around the blogosphere lately has been that Google is set to acquire DoubleClick, one of the largest advertising agencies online, for a cool $3.1 billion.

All very interesting in itself, with Microsoft making noise that Google is starting to look anti-competitive in terms of online advertising. Many are also wondering what this means for the large amount of CPM advertising that DoubleClick run and the massive advertising clients they have (You know, the ones who are too big and ‘corporate’ to have really considered AdWords yet, but we all worry about because if they jump on the AdWords bandwagon that can only mean an increase in costs for smaller advertisers).

Stephan Spencer, however, points out something unprecedented. DoubleClick own a large SEO/SEM agency called Performics. Therefore Google are about to acquire a company who charge clients to increase their search engine positioning… on Google.

What’s even more shocking? Google state “Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.”

I can’t believe for a second that they’ll keep Performics, but if they do (and keep the SEO side of the business), they’ll have to maintain the shiniest of white-hat ethics and have no contact with Google engineers or other data-sensitive Google employees. Will that hurt the effectiveness of their campaigns? Time will tell.

If any Performics clients want to jump ship, zoomzoom are here for you!