Google/Yahoo does now deliver 93,80% of my visits

Hmm that makes me a little nervous

[zeus]

I just looked through my logs for SE and there it was : Google 52.78%
Yahoo 41.02%
Altavista 4.87%

That does make you sweat a little, specialy if it is your job. I wonder if Im the only one that is so dependend on Google search.

zeus

P.s This is nothing against Google.

[lorien1973]

Inktomi should be at least 20-25% of your referrals. I'd work on some optimizing or getting some paid inclusion there. All your eggs in one basket is bound to be a problem at some point.

[tigger]

I do pretty well on Ink and I still only hit 10/12% you can't make people use MSN people prefer Google or partners

[amazed]

depends in which country you are.

in this one .... google rules o.k.

I actually get some traffic from specialised directories. It just means my site will not go into complete oblivion if google drops me.

I feel very concerned about it.

[zeus]

Inktomi, yes that should be the NO. 2, but MSN use looksmart for the first rankings then inktomi.
I do get some hits from MSN websearch, but not much maybe 1%, but in my categorie theres alot of competition mostly 500.000 - 3mill. search results.

zeus

[voodoo]

So I'm wondering, if someone was to rank 1st on all search engines, what would be the expected share of traffic coming from each of the major portals/search engines? That's ignoring any effect overture or google adwords might have on click thru's. Any guesses based on your experiance?

voodoo

[aroach]

I agree that you should have more from MSN.

Here are mine for the month of July 2003 so far:

Google 36.23%
Yahoo 26.58%
MSN 24.86%
AOL Netfind 9.90%
Ask Jeeves 0.86%
AltaVista 0.73%

[zeus]

aroach, Im right about looksmart is delivering results to MSN the main index? and then inktomi come whith the websearch results.

zeus

P.s Im I realy the only one with over 90% from Google/yahoo

[swerve]

Though only 38% of my traffic come from SEs, my stats program shows the following breakdown:

Google 99.0%
Yahoo! 0.6%
MSN 0.1%

Given that Yahoo! serves Google results, I suspect the above breakdown is incorrect, and that there is an error with my stats program. Thoughts?

[voodoo]

Go to the overture keyword suggestion tool, then to google keyword sandbox, and compare the popularity of your keywords in each. Google is very popular with some groups (the 'geek' community for example.)

voodoo

[TravelSite]

Despite high listings in almost all (uk) search engines, the vast majority of our traffic comes from Google/Yahoo.

In my view there are two reasons for this. The first most obvious reason is that Google and Yahoo are very popular.

The second reason is that the other engines/portals are increasingly using Overture, Adwords and Espotting/FindWhat for their listings. I.e. the traffic never gets to our log files unless you pay up!

This pay for click trend has been increasing over the past few years to the decrement of traditional free listings and is set to continue. The 'free' results are now way down the bottom of most pages, on the 2/3rd page or (worst case) gone altogether. This has shifted focus from seo to more business focused skills - advertising, return on investment etc.

Freeserve is a great example of this in the uk - its very popular yet I suspect the log files won't be showing much traffic from it as almost ALL its results are now overture.

I think that this will result in Google accounting for an increasing amount of free traffic - and me getting to know ppc/cpc better than I wanted to :)

[Catnip]

Here is our breakdown for the Month of July so far. This is with OUT any paid inclusion. However we were getting around 2500-3000 unique's a day from Google for the past six months. And so far for this month only around 1000 a day? I can't figure out how this has happened, we have not changed anything. And our most popular keywords have not really changed in the Google serps. But obviously it has also killed our Yahoo traffic. Has anyone lost a lot of Google traffic this month? And my Microsoft traffic has almost doubled so far this month with around 1500 unique's a day?

BTW PR 6 (if anyone cares anymore about PR :)).

*** July ***
1. microsoft network 48.04%
2. google 35.89%
3. yahoo 10.63%
4. aol netfind 2.44%
5. ask jeeves 1.06%

*** June ***
1. google 56.27%
2. yahoo 21.11%
3. microsoft network 14.54%
4. aol netfind 5.47%
5. overture 0.65%

[edited by: Catnip at 9:51 pm (utc) on July 10, 2003]

[zeus]

TravelSite, Those paid listings could also make SEs unpopular with the users, because they see the same results on all SEs and they maybe want some new results instead of Amazon everytime or some els, then they go to Google where everybody has a chance, that means more different results.

zeus

[chewy]

Business site, US based, PR 6

*** July *** as reported by Web Trends Live ***

1. google 46.9%
2. microsoft network 22.8%
3. yahoo 17.5%
4. Overture 7.4%
5. Alta Vista 1.0%
6. aol netfind 1.7%

Recently signed up with LookSmart but it doesn't seem to be making any difference yet.

[TravelSite]

Zeus,

Good point - totally agree with you. This drives even more traffic to Google.

I've compiled a list of top sites for doing uk searches on (stats around the start of this year). This is not based on log referals, but on users entering "google"/"google.com"/"google.co.uk" into search engines - which a lot of people do. I've stripped out things I'm not interested in (e.g. if a user was looking for 'msn chat' it was ignored - which heavily effects msn/yahoo's placement).

SearchEnginePercentage
Google42 (.com/.co.uk gives the same results)
Ask.co.uk12
Ask.com10
Yahoo.co.uk8
Yahoo.com7
Msn.com2.5
Lycos.co.uk2
Msn.co.uk2
Freeserve2
Aol.com1
Altavista.com1
(and lots of others below the 1% mark)

The only problem with this is that I have no ideal how accurate it is (several things look out of place)!

[steveb]

I don't know about obscure areas but Inktomi is close to irrelevant for competitive areas. MSN results are Zeal/Looksmart. I get great traffic from MSN but less than 5% of that is because of Inktomi.

Zeal/Looksmart/MSN, Ask and Altavista all can deliver valuable traffic and if you aren't getting any that is a weakness in your business.

[BigDave]

So far this month

Google 74.8
Yahoo 17.4
AOL 2.1
Netscape 0.8

Total 95.1%

My total traffic from all the other search engines goes up each month. But Google's percentage keep climbing.

The reason?

Google crawls my site more completely, more often. I rank on new searches quicker. I am also climbing in the SERPs quicker in Google.

While it is a great idea to diversify, and I recommend that everyone do what they can, the only way I can make strides in increasing the percentage the other search engines give me would be to start blocking Googlebot from large sections of my site.

Where I am diversified is that SEs only account for 42% of all my traffic. The rest are links and bookmarks.

[loanuniverse]

From the top thirty referring domains, these are the ones that are from search engines so far this month:

25% [google.com...]
20% [search.yahoo.com...]
20% [search.msn.com...]
2% [aolsearch.aol.com...]
2% [images.google.com...]
1% [google.ca...]
1% [web.ask.com...]
1% [google.com.au...]
1% [kanoodle.com...]

The percentages of total traffic are rough estimates of total traffic.

[Powdork]

G 38.5%
Y! 32.3%
M$N 24.1%
AOL 5%
Zeal listing all important for msn.

[Allergic]

I'm not sure if the moderator will let pass this link, but with no possibility to put table here, it is a site with 2,5k to 4,5k unique sessions by day, for the last 7 month, with a huge increase with G and big decreace of Yahoo from the last 6 month. It is also reflect the average of all the few dozens sites I get involved in SEO for various business or gov sites with almost all in english/french version.
Here the table [pages.infinit.net] for Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOl, Altavista and Lycos.

<addition>
We should mention the PPC ads here. In my case, for a average of all my clients (and specially the prior date figure in my above table) it is not more than 2 or at max 5% to Overture PPC ads.</addition>

[edited by: Allergic at 5:12 am (utc) on July 11, 2003]

[makemetop]

I have had 14,788 unique search engine visits from people looking for holidays finding one of my travel sites in the UK on search engines apart from Google (it is not listed in Google yet) in the past 3 weeks. No use of PPC on Overture or Espotting but use of paid spidering.

So, on this site 100% of my traffic does NOT come from any Google DB. Of course, this will change as soon as Google picks up the site - but no way will Google be over 90% of the traffic. If it is - something's wrong (IMHO).

[PeterD]

32% www.google.com
13% search.yahoo.com
8% search.msn.com
5% images.google.com
3% www.google.ca
2% aolsearch.aol.com
1% www.google.co.uk
1% www.google.de
1% uk.search.yahoo.com
1% www.alltheweb.com

Small US site--have DMOZ, but no Zeal or Y listing.

[aroach]

aroach, Im right about looksmart is delivering results to MSN the main index? and then inktomi come whith the websearch results.

I really don't know. I started getting a lot more MSN traffic when I submitted several content pages to Zeal.

I see a bot named Scooter often but don't know if he's MSN related or not.

[Powdork]

Unless I am mistaken, scooter is from alta vista.
i hear Snowbird has a good Alta vista.;)

[bilalak]

In the arab world

Google is number one by far for most sites.

I am getting:
60% google
15% yahoo
10% msn
5% ATW
and 5% for others

this is wierd but this is life with Arabic language web sites

[vitaplease]

No way of saying what percentage's per search engine should be normal with such a diverse and international crowd here at WebmasterWorld.

Factors:

1. Size of the site

Whilst Google and Alltheweb will index nearly every page of my approx. 3000 page website, Altavista stops at a third and inktomi at half.

I'd say it would be easier to have a 100 page website nearly fully listed in all search engines. Also pay for spidering/listing becomes more realistic.

2. Nature of the website

My audience are engineers, they tend to be Google users (early adapters and acknowledgers of the better quality of Google), I would also say these type of searchers would probably use multi-word search queries more often and therefore a larger site would benefit of more internal entry page-visits.

3. Language(s) of the site

As bilalak mentions, some countries are total Google addicts.

4. MSN - Zeus

Zeus is fine for non-profit promotion - useless for profit-product pages.

I have 90+% referrals from Google/Yahoo/AOL since about 6 months and I'd say nothing to worry about for a well established site, because if ATW, INK or future MSN would capture market share from Google, rankings would tend to be the same anyway - as algos converge.

I'd say, for a bigger site, with english content and an international B2B outlook, if you don't have 90% of SE referrals from Google and its partners - you do not court well to Google or you are a big PPC/PFI spender ;)