Here’s something that many people tend to discount in the Search industry - Yahoo.
I was checking out the stats for one of our websites today which I had been optimising about two or so months ago. I hadn’t noticed too much of a rise in traffic but I did see that traffic had been increasing, slowly but steadily since my tweaks. To investigate further I did some digging around in Google Analytics and found that Yahoo and Live (well, not really Live) were sending us decent traffic for once! Take a look at these graphs:
Here is Yahoo…
Here is Live…
However, it’s quite easy to see who the real breadwinner is here. Just take a look at what Google gave us over the same period, will you…
Regardless, Yahoo’s contribution of traffic to our site is still not to be sneezed at. Of the 2,100 visitors it sent us, they accounted for 16,000 page views that period. This is all up from a trickle of traffic which they used to send our way. Here are some of the things I’ve done which may have impacted the way they rank our site in their SERPs:
- Added Content relevant Headings to pages
- Added XML and TXT site maps
- Improved the internal linking structure with a HTML based sitemap consisting of less than 100 links per page.
- Tidying up the code on the site a little.
I can’t say for sure whether these changes did anything, but I have no other explanation for the rise in organic traffic. What do you think?
Do you use ‘Yahoo!’?
Related Posts
Posted by Robert Kingston on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 9:43 pm. Category: Marketing, My Projects, Reviews, Social Media. Comment Feed: RSS 2.0. Leave a Comment below, or a trackback from your site.
No Robert, I don’t, I have to admit I go straight to Google!
This is good information you are giving to us, and I’m happy to subscribe via.RSS
You know if we all pooled our knowledge, we could storm the blogosphere. Look for my articles on Belief Systems (soon).
Carol Webb
August 23rd, 2007
There is nothing strange that many people uses Yahoo. I think it is a very good search engine. Nowadays the leaders are: Google, Yahoo and MSN. And 50% of leaders traffic goes through Google, other half - through Yahoo (30%) and MSN (20%)
Ukrainian
August 25th, 2007
Google really did turn into a great search engine, and boy did they destroy the competition.
Remember when Hotbot, Lycos and Excite were major players?
mlankton
August 25th, 2007
Hahaha, those were the days…
I remember using Altavista and Metacrawler mainly. I didn’t start using Google until 2001!
I used to sort through pages and pages of SERPs and never found what I was looking for. I think Google does a great job right now. It really sets a high standard for other engines to reach.
Robert Kingston
August 26th, 2007
Well, depends on the country. In some countries yahoo gets virtually no market share, while in others it often reaches a substantial share (up to 30%). Anyhow, better concentrate on google…
jews
August 28th, 2007
I’m with “Jews”. In most cases Google is the best choice.
Jew
September 3rd, 2007
Well, i admit i use Yahoo for my email because i like their interface. I found it more user friendly than the gmail. For searches, then i go for google.
mortgage refinance in california
September 18th, 2007
I love the whole “breadwinner” use! *squeals in excitement*
Jeann
October 13th, 2007
Hahaha speaking of bread - You have to love the new sour dough bread craze thats going on. I love the taste and it’s supposed to be good for you…
Robert Kingston
October 21st, 2007
I rarely use yahoo. Are there any good demographics on who uses yahoo, such as age and gender or geographic location?
Austin Properties
October 26th, 2007
Not really, you could try alexa rank, but then that would be skewed toward the demographic which uses Alexa toolbar.
Otherwise another service you could use is Quantcast.
Here are some stats which may be of help:
http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com
Again, they’re just estimates of the figures but these will probably be the best you can get for free.
Robert Kingston
October 27th, 2007
IT is true Yahoo and MSN live is going to contribute more of the traffic we get from search engines. If google has a competition it is best for webmasters and website owners
Seven Shed
December 14th, 2007
I dunno about that one, Seven. I think for website owners and webmasters who are performing SEO to capture search traffic, if we all had to worry about optimising our sites for 10 different engines it would be hard to rank consistently in them all.
I find that Yahoo returns markedly different results to me in SERPs and MSN, well that’s entirely different again. If we had to focus on optiising our sites for each of these different engines, we’d have a horrible time trying to rank. It’s like that old saying by Confucious - “Man who chase two rabbit catches none.”
I think the people who benefit most out of the competition for search traffic, are consumers and end users who benefit from more accurate results.
Robert Kingston
December 14th, 2007
For Yahoo and Live! it is very difficult to compete with giant - Google. Google gives a lot more traffic than Yahoo and Live!.
Juno
February 26th, 2008
i use Yahoo for my email and google for search i think small groups of people use yahoo fo search info
english beefeaters
March 20th, 2008
By the stats Google is used ten times more then Yahoo
Video Chat Software
April 8th, 2008
Yahoo is goo for e-mail. but not for search. Google Best!
Serg
June 19th, 2008