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/WebDevJim
This last two weeks joe surfer has resorted to other search engines. Even though my site still is on the top five positions on Google after all the suffling that has gone on, joe surfer is increasingly coming from Yahoo,Ask Jeeves, dogpile and other meta search engines. Has anyone else noticed this?
No. Here are my relative numbers for the top three search engines over the past three months, using Google as a baseline:
DEC: Google 1.00, Yahoo .26, MSN .34
JAN: Google 1.00, Yahoo .26, MSN .27
FEB: Google 1.00, Yahoo .25, MSN .13
(Referrals from other search engines are minimal in comparison to the Big Three.)
In raw numbers of referrals, Google and Yahoo are both up while MSN is down sharply down.
I don't know why MSN referrals have dropped so much in both relative and raw numbers; fortunately, the loss of traffic from MSN has been offset by an increase in traffic from other sources--especially Google, where I've seen a nearly 50% increase in monthly referrals since December.
SyntheticUpper - is your site in Spanish?
No, English, I'm in the UK. Most of these results are coming from Lycos UK we think. Google country-filters have certainly been playing up since Floraustidisaster*, but seem o.k. now. We just try to get on with running our business, but it is a bit of a mystery.
*o.k. let's not beat around the bush - they effectively stopped working during that period.
This is character defamation and against the TOS. I hope the mods have taken notice!
:)
~30-35% Google
~30-35% Yahoo
~30% other (MSN, AOL, AV, etc,)
For a few million impressions in the past couple of days it is now more like:
~55% Yahoo
~20% Google
~15% MSN
~10% other
Yahoo, has been inching closer to my Google numbers for the first time in a few years with the new system.
Interesting. For my sites, while the drop of hits from msn.com is not as sharp as yours, it is significant. For the key SERPs, my sites are doing VERY well on msn.com, as they also were in the past. And if you check out my sites EFV (trivially easy to find with any search engine after checking my profile here), the demographics of users are much different than yours. The conclusion I draw is people are using msn.com less often now then before.
For my sites, while the drop of hits from msn.com is not as sharp as yours, it is significant. For the key SERPs, my sites are doing VERY well on msn.com, as they also were in the past.
Same here. I've got a handful of "money" pages on my content site that have always generated good income from affiliate sales, and they're doing quite well in MSN (which, for a few pages, is sending me more traffic than Google does). I think the drop in MSN referrals is more of a general erosion on minor inside editorial pages where I might be getting 3 or 4 instead of 5 or 6 MSN referrals a day. As you suggest, maybe MSN isn't getting used as much for search as it was in the past--at least when users are searching for information, as most of my visitors are.
Google is down 40% as of today.
Any number of factors could cause this. Maybe your rankings in other search engines have improved suddenly. I would not necessarily conclude that there is a mass exodus of Google users to other search engines. Also, don't forget that Yahoo switched to it's new Inktomi search during the past two weeks. Maybe you had/have high rankings in Inktomi, which may account for your higher Yahoo traffic (and a simultaneous decrease in Google referrals).
So you can't just say joe surfer is switching search engines. The results of 2 of the 3 big SE's have dramatically changed and any analysis now that google is losing traffic is kind of silly unless you have stats from a huge pool of websites to back that statement up.
Yes, we do have that but I agree with you.
What we are seeing is not due to "users switching search engines."
That will come later.
It is due to the changed composition of the SERPs on the three search engines providing most of those results. MSN and Looksmart is a whole other thread.
Before Florida and partially after Brandy, Google declared that our sites were providing exactly what google.com search engine users were looking for. As a result, Yahoo was also providing these valuable resources to their search users as well.
After Florida, Google no longer considered some of those sites to be as worthwhile or as valuable. They changed their mind a bit in Brandy but not completely.
Post Brandy, while Yahoo was using Google results, traffic from Google and Yahoo were about equal. (That is using a small sample of less than 70 million searches.)
Since the switch-over on Yahoo to their new results, the traffic from Yahoo has gone from 35% of search traffic to 55% of search.
The raw number of searches from Yahoo has become larger than they were pre-Florida and has risen substantially since the database switch.
The raw number of searches from Google post-Brandy to now has not changed a lot. From Pre-Florida to now it has gone down a lot on some sites and gone way up on other sites. Many have not been affected.
That seems to me to imply not that more users are using Yahoo search instead of Google search but that more users are finding our sites easier in the Yahoo SERPs and that they are finding those results relevant and clicking through to them.
I suspect that somewhere, someone who generates auto-spam directories and contentless, dynamic spider traps for a living is finding that their sites are getting much more traffic from Google and
"that more users are finding our sites easier in the Google SERPs and that they are finding those results relevant and clicking through to them."
This is a massive reversal from a month or so ago. As you can guess I fell out of g, but luck was was on my side and fell in yahoo/msn (not by any insight, pure luck, previous I never did anything worthwhile with ink overture etc)
But my sales are 10-fold up...yes ten fold what they were before. In all I have simply swapped positions with g to yahoo/msn. Traffic is much the same, maybe a little higher.
I now realise the time and effort wasted on g
