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Yahoo Traffic: Part Deux

         

JamesR

4:05 pm on May 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Thread continued from previous [webmasterworld.com]...

agerhart

4:08 pm on May 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

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of about 3,100 hits, a good 2,800 came from Yahoo........I am loving 'em this week.

JamesR

4:12 pm on May 25, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Yahoo used to be my top referer but Google has now passed them by 500 a week. With Yahoo proper (not Yahoogle), you seem to reach a peak since you are only going to show up under a limited number of terms. With Google, over time as your site and savvy grows, you will be found under more and more keywords and traffic will steadily increase as you keep at it (barring any unforseen algo change that would wipe out your rankings....)

2_much

6:19 pm on May 29, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've never seen Google outperform Yahoo. If you come up on the first page of a KW query at Yahoo, the traffic is enormous. AOL and MSN are close behind, but Yahoo is still sending more traffic than most other engines.

mivox

8:21 pm on May 29, 2001 (gmt 0)

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Yahoo used to top Google for me, but not anymore. I'm just drooling at the thought of Google picking up more search result outlets like Yahoo. Seems like we can't lose if the Google empire starts expanding more.

2_much

9:18 pm on May 30, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



We just got a site ranked # 1 in Aol for a relatively competitive keyword. We had 4,016 uniques in 4 days.

Another site with a good title and description in Yahoo who comes as # 1 in the SERP's got 2,625 uniques in 4 days.

This wasn't the case in the past. Yahoo has really slowed down for us and is sending less traffic than ever.

Drastic

3:09 pm on May 31, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I finally got to the first SERP on a recent Yahoo listing. Main 2-word keyphrase is #3. Is #6 on Google. Yahoo is performing best. (But Yahoo users fit the demographic very well)

Interesting that it got on the first SERP the same time as getting the first Google listings.

dogboy

7:21 pm on Jun 1, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



always hard for me to talk about this subject.... the only way to know for sure is to nail #1 listings across a number of engines, for a given phrase, then look at uniques *for that phrase only*.

See what I mean? ...you can't just say, 'I am #1 here, there, and over there, and this one gives me the most traffic', because for all we know, you might have nailed a bunch of other spin off phrases that are inflating your gross numbers for that engine.... or maybe that engine will stem words, or look at plurals and singular as the same search... you have to be careful when you compare traffic numbers... and we haven't really touched on *quality* ...if you get paid 'per click' versus 'per sale', you might value those clicks differently as well... anyway if we could put all that info together and draw some general conclusions cool... but if the question is just 'which engine sends you the most traffic' then then a similar question 'what music do you listen to?', or 'what do you like to eat?'
... both great topics for the Foo forum:)

mivox

7:26 pm on Jun 1, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Yeah, the details of what demographic you're targeting, what rankings you've acheived in how competitive a field, etc., etc., are all the deciding factors in how much traffic you receive...

What was interesting at the beginning of this thread is the idea that Yahoo could be the #1 referrer for so many different people, who's sites were ranked in so many different spots for so many different target deomgraphics and keywords, etc. When one site is the top referrer for the majority of respondents, regardles of the "real" deciding factors of each individual case, it makes a very strong case for that site's overall clout online.

dogboy

2:31 pm on Jun 2, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"it makes a very strong case for that site's overall clout online."

...most definitely... not really scientific, but the evidence is so strong that it would be very difficult to argue otherwise.

As far as I'm concerned, Y! is the bomb as far as big, high quality traffic. A strong link there can float an entire business and it is much more stable than any engine as far as serp fluctuation goes...

The reason I warned (newbies) to compare apples with apples, is because the numbers and percentages that you see here can get out of wack depending on the situation... for example, you might have a domain with 5000 pages. You submit it to Y!, you get one index page in there and you nail 3 terms.... Great. BUT the same site in AV might be coming up for 500 searches and is driving more traffic...

Generally the bigger the site, the more traffic you will get in the deep crawler engines (if the pages were optimized), and therefore the lower the Y percentages will be in overall site traffic... not because you are comparing portals, but because you are comparing one link to many.

2_much

9:19 pm on Jun 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



That's an excellent point Dogboy, and very true.
The quantity and quality of traffic will depend on the kind of site, size of the site, and it's purpose - whether it's informational, to sell a service, a bit ticket item or a low cost item or product.
Small, themed e-commerce sites tend to do well in Yahoo, and definitely provide a great ROI.
This, again, will depend on several factors. The industry, the title, the description, the category it gets listed in, etc.
But both in terms of traffic, branding and link popularity points, a Yahoo listing will most likely always be worth it.

mivox

9:27 pm on Jun 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The longer our site is online, the smaller the Yahoo slice of our traffic pie becomes... our traffic is steadily increasing, and the increase seems to be primarily from crawler engines that have indexed a large number of our "deeper" pages, which bring in more targeted traffic than the index page listed in Yahoo.

That's definitely a serious consideration... but for dynamically driven shopping sites (which may not get indexed well) and "mainstream" commercial sites, Yahoo may be continuing to beat all, traffic wise. I'm getting the feeling that Yahoo may be good at hitting the slightly more "tech savvy" end of AOL demographic...

Kinda like a large shopping mall as opposed to a specialty boutique in the "brick & mortar" world... If you're on the lookout for a very specific or unusual product, you'll go to the specialty boutique (or the crawler engine and/or specialty directories). If you're doing more general window shopping, or only have a vague category of product you're looking for, you're more likely to browse the mall (visit Yahoo)