In a perfect world great things remain great, honest people and defenders of truth remain spotless, Client #9 still has wife #1 and stocks always go up.

In the real world The US economy is struggling because of a real estate driven credit melt down, Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer seems to have some very expensive and now high profile habits after being the peoples champion rooting out corruption, seeing the look on her face recently, I can’t imagine that client # 9 will have wife # 1 for long and will probably lose most of his accumulated assets in the process and the number one search engine on the planet, Google has lost over $95,000,00,000 (Billion) in market cap over the last 4 months.

So what does all of this “not so good” news have to do with SEO, SEM or the future of search?

Let me preface any of my comments by saying that this scenario is only hypothetical, my thoughts and what ifs, are based solely on my understanding of the equity markets and the extraordinary pressure placed on CEO’s and Board of Directors when their stock is trading off hard and giving everyone associated with them a blood bath of astronomical proportion.

A public company is responsible to shareholders, institutions, mutual fund managers, employees, the SEC and the public at large that sees the company’s logo everywhere they go. Unfortunately when Eric and Sergey started Google I am certain they could never have expected it to morph into what it is today. They were the most successful and high priced IPO (Initial Public Offering) in history and now have some of the largest and most influential mutual funds and institutional investors in the world tied to their share price and day to day decision making.

With that back drop what will change with the current process of evaluating billions of websites and how they are ranked, featured, marketed, promoted, placed and branded. What companies are they looking at acquiring, what is the magic formula that will get them back the market share they have lost and get there shareholders again drooling at the prospects of the magic men on wall street continuing their explosive growth.

My opinion on the current circumstances with Google are that everyone in the SEO, SEM, PPC, Social Media Marketing or any related industry had better watch closely the changes that may be coming, as a company on the ropes looks to bring one up from the floor to stay on top of the search engine food chain. You can bet that there are strategic planning meetings occurring in every search engine board room at this very moment including Yahoo, MSN and certainly Google as analysts, business execs, auditors, accountants and board members look for new revenue lines from current clients and changes that need to exist to survive in the future and build confidence in shareholders and investors. The cost of not coming out with guns blazing to address the immediate circumstances will be significant indeed. These decisions are also not being made by guys sensitive to our needs as SEO marketers or guys that really care about protecting the unbiased and pure nature of search. They are all about $$$$$ and market share, stay tuned!