Yahoo - can you feel the love?

With Google showing irrelevant search results - Yahoo captures hearts

[seofan]

Those of us who have faithfully stuck with the recommendations of Google have felt somewhat betrayed by the recent turn of events.

After discovering that Yahoo was picking up the ball that Google has dropped in the name of $$$ and looming IPO hopes - we have embraced the new and improved Yahoo.

We have seen a significant change in referrer stats; an increase in MSN, Yahoo, and AOL referred traffic. Are you seeing the same?

[quotations]

I just posted about that here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I believe the answer is "yes"

[viggen]

nope, still Google dominates the stats on my information site. Yahoo stayed about the same, the only slight movement was that MSN gained a bit.

More interesting is to me that my informational site is not in the yahoo directory and so doesn't seem to have a chance in the serps.

[seofan]

viggen, if you aren't in Yahoo yet, then you would be right in seeing that your stats aren't affected by them.

It will be interesting to see the stats when you are in Yahoo ;-)

I've been tracking some of my client sites since 1996 and this has become an interesting race after about 4 years of intense focus on one referrer source.

[markus007]

I see google returning relevant results, i see yahoo dominated by professional spammers. What we are seeing right now is the first iteration of yahoo, just wait till its first major update...

[steveb]

"Are you seeing the same?"

You might want to actually think this question through. It doesn't mean anything. If a person had higher Ink rankings than their Google ones, they'll see more traffic. If they had worse ones, they'll see less traffic. It's a totally irrelvant comparison.

[GrantNZ]

Both Yahoo and Google both now appear to be suffering from ranking out of date material/sites. Googles techs may call this content, Yahoo techs may later call this spam. :-)

[cbpayne]

We have seen a significant change in referrer stats; an increase in MSN, Yahoo, and AOL referred traffic. Are you seeing the same?

Is that because more people are using Yahoo or becasue you have dropped rankings in Google?

For 3 of my sites, they all rank higher for almost all their keywords in Yahoo than Google, but in the last 7 days here are the combined stats based on search engine referrals:

Google & AOL = 71%
Yahoo = 15%
Inktomi based SE's = 12.5%
The Rest = 1.5%

Even though we rank worse in Google, they still rock. Google can't be serving irrelevant results to those searching for keywords related to my sites.

[viggen]

@seofan

I am in the Yahoo Index with more pages then at Google, but not ranked well at all, as only sites that are in the Yahoo Directory covering the top spots.

cheers
viggen

[walkman]

seofan,
never rule Google, Y!, or MSN out. The last two ones have tons of resource$, but Google does too now. Maybe not as much, but the changed the game with just tens of millions. Now if they needed, they'd raise a billion in a heartbeat.

Personally, my best site is not in Y!, and so far I have no recourse on addressing or finding out why. Many people here are on the same boat. At least Google has an e-mail it answers when you get penalized or banned.

[outland88]

>i see yahoo dominated by professional spammers.

That's an understatement. I've never seen so much irrelevant junk.

[seofan]

The issue of how Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc handles relevancy wasn't really what I was looking at. I'm just seeing an increase in referrals from MSN and Yahoo - indicating to me that there may be a shift in user habits (a small, but noticeable percentage).

[europeforvisitors]

The only significant change that I've seen is a 45% drop in MSN referrals over the last three months. Yahoo is up about 35%, and Google is up by 45%.

Yahoo may be capturing hearts, but Google is capturing even more, and MSN has been jilted by many thousands of lovers--at least on my site.

[alika]

Peter Jennings featured Brin & Sergei of Google in his news segment a couple of weeks ago. Jennings described Google as the company whose name quickly became a VERB. According to him, "to google" means to "search on the Web"

That to my mind is a great indication of the branding power of G to the masses. Y may be winning the hearts of webmasters and SEOs with their recent change, but they need to catch up and rebuild their reputation as the best search engine before they can wrest market share away from G. Y has become synonymous to ... er, what is their main business again?

[cbpayne]

I'm just seeing an increase in referrals from MSN and Yahoo - indicating to me that there may be a shift in user habits (a small, but noticeable percentage).

Is that a real shift or a shift because you rank lower in Google?

I am certainly not seeing this.

[worker]

I noticed an immediate reduction in traffic once Yahoo stopped serving Google Search results. What I was surprised to see was that my conversion percentage went up dramatically. Less traffic, but almost the same amount of conversions, told me a lot about the people that had been using Yahoo. I have to admit to being a little shocked by what I'm seeing too, because I had anticipated a corresponding reduction in conversions.
I think the existing Yahoo results are spam heavy, and while relevant, they are of low quality. When Yahoo figures out how to rank sites so that high quality relevant sites appear at the top of the results, they'll have something. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they get it working soon.

[edited by: worker at 12:45 am (utc) on Feb. 29, 2004]

[seofan]

Fortunately, there is no major impact on the majority of sites we are in charge of monitoring in Google positions. There has just been a noticeable shift in referrer results in the log files.

[seofan]

Worker - since Yahoo was a directory commanded by human beings - the directory was efficient but not automatic such as a search engine format. When they refine this process, I believe that Yahoo will be quite formidable and will pick up a tremendous amount of traffic to cushion the Google blow.

Wonder when YahooGuy will show up? lol.

[boomer770]

My Overture daily average has jumped since Yahoo's switch. Most likely due to the fact that spam and irrelevant sites now rule in Yahoo. Umm, what a great way for them to make even more money.

[2_much]

boomer777, if they serve irrelevant results, people will stop using them and they'll lose revenue because people won't go to yahoo.com to search at all, meaning they won't click on overture.

Also, I think it's not very effective to compare traffic as no one can see a big enough picture to udnerstand the real changest. We all only see our little parts of the web and not much more.

Instead of looking for traffic I am spending all of my time and energy looking at my keyword SERP's to try and understand the commonalities.