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My sites in general enjoyed greater than 70% Google traffic pre November last year. Those that were adversely affected have lost all of this and effectively gained nothing from Yahoo et al.
This is in spite of my work on these sites pushing me to the top of the Yahoo results for many of my KWs. Is anyone else seeing significant increases in Yahoo traffic wrt where they were before?
The rest are all under 1%
If I look back to December it's pretty much the same. Yahoo may have dropped Google but I rank just as good on the new Yahoo :)
Craig
Google as before a huge #1. Jubii still very strong #2. Yahoo dropped out of the fight with MSN and Eniro for #3 when they took the consequences of their defeat in Scandinavia.
For my still rather new English sites:
Google very strong #1. Yahoo good #2. No-one else sending much.
If some site is ranked same on both yahoo and google, the traffic coming from google as of today will be more.(exceptions are there as Yahoo dominates dating and femime related industries)
But Definately with its new initiatives Yahoo looks strong to claim the throne of busiest search engine in the world.
Sure would like to know whether or not Google's traffic is on a downhill slide. Haven't heard any moaning about pink slips at the 'Plex yet, so Google's traffic must be holding up.
BTW I have seen good convertions from Overture after Yahoo's take over.
Averaging out about 10 sites I see:
Google: 70%
Yahoo: 15%
MSN: 8%
Others: 7%
I suspect Google is dominant for a few reasons.
First of all I optimize nearly always for Google, just as most of us probably do.
Secondly it's got nearly every page of all my sites indexed whereas the others (with the exception of the new Yahoo) only have the index page or maybe a few more.
Yahoo actually gets me better rankings for many searches but the masses are all surfing with Google.
I also find Google visitors from all over the world while the other engines are mostly .com.
This "market share" is ofcourse heavily dependant on user demographics and geographic location. Ie it seems to me that Google dominates the "techie" sectors (90%+)and Europe (70%+).
It's very difficult to tell, unless one has many busy sites, which rank equally well on broad kw lists, BOTH before and after Y switch to his own SE.
"New" Yahoo SE is currently the playground of SEOs imho, as the algo seems very focused on on-page factors (which makes it hard compete, because a 10-15% KWD would make a "Real" biz site look very unprofessional).
So my feedback on Y comes from non-commercial sites only, about 40k - 80k unique IPs/month, referral queries include 1000s of keyword combinations.
For "mainstream" non-commercial sectors and english language but worldwide audience (but mostly in Europe), the Yahoo share of referrals was around 18%-22%% pre-switch (ie with Google results) and last 45 days it was 14%-16%. Google is almost 70%-75%.
I can't say if this change is due to users moving from Y to G, it could be that those sites rank a bit less well on in new Yahoo, but they often rank in top5 in Y anyway.
In competitive / commercial sectors, Yahoo is less than 10% for me, sometimes as low as 5%. MSN between 2% and 5%.
For local language (greek) sites, Y is about 10%, G about 75%, the rest from 2 local SEs.
All abovementioned sites are well crawled by SEs.
So my question is: was there a change in each SE's market share? Did users move from one SE to another looking for more relevant results (or whatever ;-)?
Much more than "Techies" it is the college-educated searchers, in my view. My first site, a non-technical one, though dealing with college professors and researchers, does equally well on Google and Yahoo but almost all referrals are from Google.
60% Google
27% Yahoo
10% MSN
3% AOL
with other SE's too small to bother counting. After February it's been running about
72% Google
15% Yahoo
10% MSN
3% AOL
My non-commercial hobby site is in what I suppose you'd call a public-services area. Very little "competition" overall, mostly some other hobby sites and the service providers themselves. Each page is on a specific topic, and most of them are in the top five positions on Google for "obvious" search phrases related to their topics. I haven't checked many of them on Yahoo, but the ones I've spot-checked are also doing OK there; likewise on MSN.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between my Yahoo and MSN SERPs versus Google is that Yahoo and MSN don't have my more recently-added pages, since about December or January. But I don't add completely new pages very often, usually about one or two per month, so only about 1% of my pages are affected by this.
Secondly, one must take into account user habits - People don't change 'just like that'. People just aren't aware as we are here about search engine backroom happenings: it's just the same old Google or Yahoo window or whatever opening (and usually the default home page in their browser) in front of them every time they want to do a search in most cases. It would take some VERY bad search results to make users change their habits all at once in the space of four months - so I think we can forget that argument too, or at least give it little importance.
But yes, getting the most traffic from the SE that gives you the lowest ranking IS odd, and perhaps over time will lead to change - but certainly not in less than half a year.
Agreed. I used "techies" and "Average Joe's" as stereotypes covering a broad spectrum to keep things simple.
The same does indeed apply to college grads Vs others.
A lot of Google's promotion has come from sources that target the higher educated, technical and generally higher income groups. This is everything from quality newspapers/magazines, TV stations and shows, to Webmasters promoting Google to their self employed and business owner clients.
Traffic is one thing, conversion to sales is another. The better educated, technical and higher income groups may have more disposable income, but they don't always convert as well. AOL users have always been my best source of conversions percentage wise!
Although traffic is important, most of us here care more about money in our pockets.
Is Google losing market share? Obviously yes as it no longer has Yahoo. Is Google.com losing market share, I believe so, but not by mass exodus.....just a slow trickle.
April
Google - 60%
Yahoo - 13%
MSN - 8%
All traffic in terms of raw numbers is up for all three sites. Yahoo and MSN's numbers are up 50%. Google's is up some 700%.
I'm benefiting from regional search in Google.
Agreed. I used "techies" and "Average Joe's" as stereotypes covering a broad spectrum to keep things simple
Yes, "techies" use Google.
As an example, here are the referrer stats for the website of the "analog" web log stats software:
1001 www.google.com/
127 www.excite.co.jp/
126 216.239.37.104/
126 japan.internet.com/
114 www.google.co.uk/
103 216.239.39.104/
93 www.tokyo-kasei.ac.jp/
79 www.google.de/
This particular site ranks well (top10) in Y and G for several keywords.
I'm not very excited that one SE (Google) accounts for 90% of all referrals, but it's a fact. I have several site samples of my own similar with the abovementioned stats.
