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what can be the cause of this enormous difference?
Two completely different brand Search Engines with two completely different algorithms.
Isn't choice great?
Are you getting converting traffic from Yahoo?
TJ
[edited by: trillianjedi at 9:47 am (utc) on Aug. 26, 2004]
The current theories seems to believe that Yahoo favours onsite optimisation (keywords etc) whereas Google favours offsite (inbound links etc).
Good question, no that's the problem, I've got several sites ranked very high in Yahoo, but almost no converting traffic.
Ofcourse Yahoo isn't as big as google, nevertheless it's the second largest SE in the world, so you would expect to get pretty much traffic from it.
Performance does seem to vary - there are a couple of webmasters here that I know swear by Yahoo! traffic (a few that get grade A quality traffic from MSN too).
It all depends on your little corner of the market.
How old are the sites? Have you been through the Google forums here to get some ideas on how to improve your rankings in google?
If you're in a competitive market space, the only true way in google is inbound anchor text links and patience (assuming you have the basics in place already - good content, structure, page titles etc).
I think you'd do well to ignore the fact that Yahoo! and Google are very different and produce different results and concentrate on improving your rankings in Google. Just forget about Yahoo! for the moment - you're #1 there anyway.
Staying with the off-page factors (anchor text inbound links) and having a little faith and a little patience will get you a long way.
TJ
Hee hee, ofsp
If you're in a competitive market space, the only true way in google is inbound anchor text links and patience
I was wrong with that statement - you can also consider a PPC business model with Google (AdWords).
TJ
Must be totally different algos :)
Its much more complex than that. I have discovered one trick how to get a page to rank on Yahoo well using offsite links, including pages with incredibly poor on page optimization. And this works even when the inbound links are decidely of the black hat type. If I were to ever go over to the dark side, I could spam the heck out of Yahoo/MSN. I won't go into the specific details, given that this forum is read by a lot of SEOs of the black hat variety. ;)
At least you can sticky me the details.
I was looking at my logs and I see a referral for a fairly popular keyword from Yahoo...the ONLY mention was in the META description and it was ranked 4th. Needless to say I was shocked.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to pass on a fraction of the traffic Google does. It seems that I get more traffic from bizarre keyword combinations on Google than the main ones in Yahoo.
I'm sure Yahoo will change it's algo to be more like Google's at some point BUT at the moment they are probably benifiting from Google's algo:
i.e. if Google penalise for over-optimising then people stop doing it because after all G is more important. This means Yahoo also doesn't suffer from spamming as much. Of course there are things like cloaking but I've neot been there
