With all systems now go on the merger between Yahoo! and MSN after American competition regulators gave the massive transaction the go-ahead, search engine marketers are pondering over whether this will mean major changes to their optimisation strategies.

The two parties have said that they will be in no hurry to roll out the service, and will wait until they can iron out all possible glitches before rolling out their new entity.

Writing on SearchEngineWatch, Jason Tabeling, director of search and media at New Jersey-based interactive marketing firm Rosetta, said building trust with MSN could be a key tactic.

“My gut tells me that folks who don’t already have some established quality score credit with MSN when everyone gets merged will be at a disadvantage,” he said.

Advertisers should also be better able to target the sites they want to be represented on through Yahoo!, he said, which Tabeling described as “long overdue, and (a move which) will help advertisers’ performance”.

“The ability to block poor referring partner sites is something that has greatly improved our clients’ results, and is something that is differentiating in the marketplace today, even when compared to Google”, he told SEW.

Yahoo is also believed to be working on its own equivalent to Google Sitelinks, where advertisements featuring top search items can be deep-linked to sellers’ sites and promotions involving those products.

These links are expected to use a cost-per-click model to generate revenue.

Extensive testing of these features is likely before they are fully implemented, but Yahoo! is said to be holding out the prospect of increases in click-through rates (the total number of clicks on an advertisement as a percentage of times the advertisement is viewed) of about 25 per cent.