Google has acquired DoubleClick Performics (http://www.performics.com).  So what does this mean?  There's no sure-fire way to tell at this point, however I have heard both good, bad and indifferent comments regarding the acquisition.

Amongst talk groups, I've seen comment such as "who said a search engine optimization company couldn't guarantee rankings?" and "...the era where someone can rank a site strategically without Google financially benefitting from it is going to come to an end."

Others don't see it as anything to be worried about "...it seems to be one very minor part of the company, and very basic at that."  

One thing is for sure that a lot of SEO experts deem this to be somewhat of a conflict of interest...the question is, will Google consider it a conflict of interest?  If not, they should.  For a company such as Google to own a company that provides SEO services, no matter how small a part of the total operation of the business they acquired -  it would be highly unlikely that they would choose to continue with that path of the business.

While SEO is a small part of DoubleClick's offerings, we simply can not predict today what Google's intentions are with the company. 

But we will wait, and watch.