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Google is by far. Our hits coming from Yahoo have dropped off steadily over the past 2 years - from around 25% total to the current less than 7% total (and the current totals include Overture listings).
Yahoo's directory has become so outdated and irrelevant that it is nearly useless for many (most?) categories. Even the weeks-behind DMOZ offers up much better listings that Yahoo does. And DMOZ appears on Google...
I get 30% of Major SE/Directory referrals from Yahoo. Also, if you can get a good listing in Yahoo you can get good traffic.
For non-profit sites, and content sites (much like WMW) Yahoo can still deliver FREE traffic (more rare than ever).
Does not matter if Yahoo is good/bad from this perspective, because it delivers traffic. My 0.02
Your traffic differences may be due to ranking changes and user demographics. There are some industries where Google is by far more popular than Yahoo. But you compare the same searches in the nets most popular keywords like music, games and so forth, and Yahoo brings in the traffic like nothing else.
I just looked, and these are the current figures for unique hit for the past 30 days from referral to our Yahoo store:
Total: 22,300
Google 6,370
Our other website: 5,057
MSN: 2,036
Yahoo: 1,870
Includes 760 Overture hits
Include 234 Google.Yahoo search hits
Actualy Yahoo directory search results: 966
AOL: 573
All other hits are from a wide variety of places, including smaller SE's, newsgroups, lists, etc.
We are #34 on a Yahoo search for the most relevant keywords. Over half of those ahead of us are not even businesses.
my stats looked like that before i got a yahoo directory listing. Granted, the listing I got is in a second tier category, meaning it got decent PR in its category and helped in google).
Since it helped in google it helps in yahoo webpages too.
Basically, if you don't have a yahoo directory listing, you might want to look into it.
However my newest site ;) heh is doing very well in other search engines. For instance I get more traffic for this site from Y!Google than google itself. (which is totally the oposite for all my other sites) And if this site were to get listed in Yahoo I can garentee it would pull more traffic from Yahoo than google by those specs alone.
:)
Yahoo's directory has become so outdated and irrelevant that it is nearly useless for many (most?) categories. Even the weeks-behind DMOZ offers up much better listings that Yahoo does. And DMOZ appears on Google
...and Google appears in Yahoo and yahoo helps google rankings. Should this partnership come to an end, Yahoo will likely continue and Google's job well, "just got alot harder" since it is no longer partnered with the largest and most used directory.
Good and bad follows just about everything. From the days of "yahoo free" to "yahoo fee" was more of a quantity control measure that assisted editors to concentrate on pages that deserve quality control. If DMOZ had the traffic that yahoo "had" and "has" I doubt this service would be free (or at minimum today's service level would drop severely below what is generally considered todays norm.
Generally speaking "free" means less than not more. Although "Google" and "DMOZ" appear to have no monetary costs this is fallacy.
1. In Google you just can't get excellent rankings without paying for it or learning about it which takes time (and time is money).
2. In DMOZ, better be related to a category that has a editor and take the time to submit a quality listing (and time is money). Don't know too many Yahoo "cats" that don't have an editor.
We "at this forum" all work for a living and post for free. If WebmasterWorld was "paid per post" the traffic of posting would go down tremendously but the overall value per posts would skyrocket (meaning you wouldn't see things like ("thanks Brett").
On the other hand, if everyone "at this forum" actually did all their work for "free", with no outside compensation not only would our workload go up, we probably wouldn't be here at WebmasterWorld sharing ideas since we share our free ideas elsewhere and all the time.
You don't find too many dead links in Yahoo, must mean their fairly up-to-date or at least web site owners regardless of the web site changes maintain the site submissions so they don't need to submit and pay again. How much more up-to-date can one get.
IMO Rod
[edited by: fathom at 3:15 am (utc) on June 4, 2002]
You don't find too many dead links in Yahoo, must mean their fairly up-to-date or at least web site owners regardless of the web site changes maintain the site submissions so they don't need to submit and pay again. How much more up-to-date can one get.
I agree completely, as long as we're only talking about the commercial categories. The "regional" categories that link to local informational sites, though, are as "good" an example of an out-of-date directory as can be found anywhere.
Yeah, I know those categories aren't what's being talked about here... I'm just frustrated because I've been trying to use them tonight! :)
There are 404 dead links, of which there are almost none - since the robot finds those and flags them.
However, the "other" type of dead link, where the URL no longer goes to the site in the description is quite common. Expired URL's are often bought up, or a splash page (only) on an ISP might exist. Those have to be found by people - and there are quite few.
Also, there are companies that are listed numerous times under different URL's. In some cases it was spamming, in others it was just that one company bought another - and is now using that URL as a re-direct page to the main site. I know of one company in our category that has 5 of those now. They have not paid for any of them, yet they get the equivalent of 5 listings in one directory compared to our 1 - which cost us $300.
And what was said in the previous message about educational, not for profit, and regional sites is quite true - the Yahoo directory is a total mess in that area.
"it is still hands down the most popular portal in the universe"
- Actually, it is 2nd. Google is first - not sure I would call either one a portal though. Yahoo lost it's first place for searching last year sometime. Still pretty significant, but I have not seen any change in the downward trend for two years now.
I'll swap any #1 listing at Google for one at Y!, the traffic is greater and more importantly the conversion rate is much better.
a #34 listing isn't going to get you much. You have to know how Yahoo works and play the game. We have had tons of threads around here about how to rank well in Yahoo. Take a look:
How to get better results in Yahoo [webmasterworld.com]
Yahoo FAQ's [webmasterworld.com]
Very bad description in Yahoo [webmasterworld.com]
Google PR directly influencing Yahoo results [webmasterworld.com]
If your complaint is that you aren;t ranking well, than yeah, I would agree you aren't going to get traffic. But if you are saying that for top ranks in Yahoo under popular keywords people won;t get alot of traffic, you will have a tough time convince those around here that get several thousand visitors a day from Yahoo.
An additional problem is the way that the Yahoo search works - it is basically pretty primitive: If I do a search for "titanium widgets" - instead of searching for that PHRASE, like it should, it picks up all the "widget" and "titanium" words and jumbles them in with the results - so sites like "Titanium baseball bats" and "widget photos" dilutes the results.
-------------------------
There's a new metric available for determining this, the total number of "search hours" users spend at a site, a figure that sees Google leading by far over other search engines. An
explanation of the new method and links to the latest search engine popularity data can be found via the URL below:
Google Tops In "Search Hours" Ratings
SearchEngineWatch.com, May 11, 2002
[searchenginewatch.com...]
Plan A is an unchangable submission, Plan B is to give them an easy edit. There is no excuse [with Y! as it is] to not get what you want.
Once you realize that, it's not too difficult to use it to your advantage...
"There's a new metric available for determining this, the total number of "search hours" users spend at a site, a figure that sees Google leading by far over other search engines"
This means nothing to me... I judge SE's buy refferals and sales... If you follow the link you provided and check out the statmarket (which judges SE's by refferals) #'s, you'll see the Y! is still #1.
Uhm. And what, exactly, is an "unchangable submission"?
We gave them an easy edit - and they still changed it for reasons unknown.
Yahoo will always make the title your company name. Make your company name the keywords you want. Make the site URL and site name the keywords you want. Yahoo will simply follow their guidelines and give you exactly what you want. That is why you see some ridiculously long URLs and titles in Yahoo. The beauty of corporate guidelines.
keywords I want: I'm a big dumb idiot
site url: imabigdumbidiot.com or better yet for yahoo im-a-big-dumb-idiot.com
site title: I'm A Big Dumb Idiot!
meta description: I'm A Big Dumb Idiot is the Internet's premier site for spamming Yahoo. Read more!!!!
contact page:
I'm a Big Dumb Idiot
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, California 94089
(408) 349-3300
Office Hours 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PST
step A: submit to Yahoo, pay big outrageous fee
step B: be very patient
step 3: get ranked in Yahoo with title you want
step D: rake in the referrals from people searching for "big dumb" "big dumb idiot" "I'm a big" and other variations
step E: laugh all the way to the bank with your new traffic source and wads of cash from your new conversions
step F: rejoice and be glad Yahoo has big dumb inclusion guidelines and ranking system
As I said, if your category is liable to draw interest and you're not in a heap of sites doing the exact same thing, it's probably worth the money and/or effort [to get a free] listing. If you're going to be trapped in a mass of other sites, skip it because no one would find you in that heap anyway. Optimize for google.
In general, I believe surfers are getting more savvy in their search terms. Check metaspy or some of the other places that let you see what's being searched for and you don't see a lot of one or two word searches anymore.
G.
What if I told you I know someone who is #5 on a single word search out of 15,000+ other sites in Yahoo, gets at least 1,300 visitors a day from that rank (+ another 826 from the category listing alone), and the site has been in Yahoo for less than 3 months? Blew me away too....it is still very possible to do very well on very competitive phrases on the Internet.
Not even close for us - it is #5, and if you take out the paid stuff, it is #6 or 7. Our Google is around 43% - but we have been on the first page for most relevant search terms there since Google first opened it's eyes.
Our major problem seems to be that the category we are in is never updated - so we have competition from people with 2-5 URL's from the same company - and we are the ONLY one that has a paid listing in that category out of 144 sites.
As far as the other tricks go, we are not about to change our company name after 25 years just so we can move up a few notches in Yahoo directory. We currently have over 2500 incoming links from Google - we would lose far more by losing those than by moving up in Yahoo.
For 4 of the 6 most relevant keywords, we are in the top 1 to 3 on almost every SE. Yahoo has a long ways to go to catch up I guess.
Just as an aside, we have a Yahoo store, which shows the average income per referall - Yahoo is way down on that. At an average of 53 cents per referal, it even comes in behind Excite - and is about 1/2 of the Google average. For some reason, Netscape is by far the highest - $6.58 per referral, but I suspect there is probably one very large order in there skewing the results.
To get traffic out of Yahoo you'd have to identify a more targeted keyword and create a keyword doorway website, and submit it like James R said. This will generate a smaller amount of traffic, but it will be highly qualified.
Which leads to my next point:
Yahoo traffic is very qualified. If you're able to rank well, you get a good amount of traffic of people who BUY. Google users are often performing research and are less likely to buy than Yahoo users. I've seen this repeatedly.
So if you can get Yahoo to work for you by submitting according to James R's suggestions, you can make a lot of money off Yahoo.
IMO, it is time to play dirty.
we may start submitting change requests for the those sites as if I were the site owner. Perhaps that way Yahoo will at least look at them.
Sorry, my bad..windsun, please sticky mail me...
[edited by: 2_much at 11:05 pm (utc) on June 10, 2002]
Please no urls - JamesR
[edited by: JamesR at 5:55 pm (utc) on June 10, 2002]
Well, cornerstones don't do much else besides hold up the building and look good doing it. Yahoo is generally doing both. Maybe "founding father" would have been a more apt description.
