Yahoo Traffic

Is it the largest source for you?

[JamesR]

Most consider this to be the #1 source of traffic but many are not doing well with a Yahoo listing. Is Yahoo yahoo! or boohoo for you? How does it compare with the rest of the engines? Is your traffic off of keyword search than click on your site (appearing as search.yahoo.com in referral logs) or do visitors go to the category your site is listed in first then click on your site (dir.yahoo.com in logs)?

I'll go first: Yahoo is the largest for me and gives about 40% more traffic than MSN (2nd) for similar positioning. Only about 1% go to the directory first and click. Main keyword is non-competitive and site shows up #2 in a keyword search. Straight Google is next followed closely by Alta, all with similar positioning. GoogleHoo is fourth with about half as much traffic as AltaVista.

[mivox]

By far our greatest raw number of referrals are counted as "bookmarks," but that includes spider activity... although a lot of bookmark visits do seem to be human, yay!

When I check referrers for the last five months combined:

Yahoo/Yahoogle - 30%
Go.com (R.I.P.) - 20% (dangit, they were GOOD to me!)
specialty index - 15%
plain google - 15%

However, that doesn't take into account our GREATLY increased AOL referrals in the last two months, since they finally updated their ODP info, and the program doesn't separate Yahoo Index from Yahoogle referrals... Right now, I'd say Yahoo, Yahoogle, Go.com and AOL are our tops. The specific percentages vary from day to day.

[jk321]

For me as a Goto advertiser:

Yahoo 24.67%
Google 13.62%
Netscape 13.44%
Microsoft Network 8.65%
GoTo 8.47%
AltaVista 7.55%
metacrawler 6.81%
Excite 4.78%
Lycos 4.23%
HotBot 2.39%
Look Smart 2.39%
DirectHit 1.65%
dogpile 0.55%
All The Web 0.36%
MegaSpider 0.18%
Northern Light 0.18%

[2_much]

For us, Yahoo is the # 1 source of referrals for any site that is listed and decently ranked in the directory (1st page). So, if a site is in the 1st page of MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, for ex, Yahoo sends the most referrals.
Our stats show that most people use the search box, and very few people scroll down to the categories.
This is very subjective and there are obviously many factors to consider, but in general, I have to say that for us, Yahoo is ALL that (and more).

[skirril]

For me its like:

#1 AOL
#2 Yahoo
#3 google.yahoo.xyz (yahoogle?)
#4 search.bluewin.ch
#5 search.ch
#6 MSN

However, yahoo is getting in fast. Page views per day doubled since I am listed in yahoo

[Marcia]

On one site, the traffic is almost exclusively Yahoo with Google second, despite some healthy rankings elsewhere.

The Yahoo traffic is multiple times the balance combined, but because of the Directory description and category, the majority of it is from the search, and a particular product in google.yahoo for which it doesn't come up among the directory listings.

In future, with a multiple product site, I will never submit for a directory listing until it's been determined which one will be the primary focus - to get the category exactly right the first time. In this case, the editor even added a category I hadn't asked for, and actually improved on the description.

[chiyo]

interesting stuff..

We have had yahoo entries for around 6 years. But very little traffic. We are a specialist targeted site but we run at around...

Google 40%
Google/Yahoo 30%
MSN 10%
Go 4% (pity about that!)
AV 5%
Yahoo >1%
Rest NL/LS/Lycos/Fast/other ink/odp partners etc 10%

Great majority of our hits are from links from external sites and most of all bookmarks as we are well established as a daily Asian business ezine with content changing daily.

We are wondering whether resubmitting to Yahoo will help withr eferrals from YH proper or whether the low hits are just a result of our limited potential readership and the way the YH directory works?

[Brett_Tabke]

Last 4 weeks.
Google-hoo
Alta (not including looksmart)
Google.com
Aol (including odp)
MSN
All the web (including sympatico.ca)
Meta engines (dog/mamma/meta..etc)
AskJeeves (including .co.uk)
Lycos (including euro's)
Iwon
Hotbot
Yahoo directory listings.
Excite.
Netscape
Google.co.uk
Less than 2% (Search.com,Looksmart,nbci,about.com,northernlight,off bred inktomi's)

[JamesR]

Just an aside for our reading audience....a site's positioning could vary greatly on each of these engines and skew the numbers. This is just meant as a guideline and rough idea of how much traffic is coming from Yahoo search and directory listings measured against other engines. Thanks all for posting, keep 'em coming -- any comments on position comparisons is helpful (gets tougher if you show up on multiple keyword searches).

[CaveToad]

For my sites it's generally AOL leading off followed by Google and Yahoo in equal portions. YH denied my listings so I'm only in the Google/YH portion but that's still driving in very significant traffic for me. Following those is MSN through submitting to LookSmart. Traffic certainly worth the price of admission.

[luckynh]

last 2 weeks:

AOL 37.21%
Google 26.17%
Yahoo 25.1%
AltaVista 4.5%
Go2Net-MetaCrawler 2.62%

seems to be about the same across most of my sites.

[Macguru]

Last month, average from 23 French language sites about art culture or education

Ranking vary a lot so are % accordingly. Up to 53% for a second position listing.

38.3% YAHOO!
12.5% GOOGLE
10.8% Viola France
10% ALTAVISTA
5.83% AllTheWeb
5% DOGPILE
4.16% HotBot
4.16% MSN(Canada)
3.33% LYCOS
1.66% MSN(US)
1.66% NORTHERNLIGHT
1.66% Sympatico Lycos
0.83% METACRAWLER

[engine]

Very interesting.

Yahoo is by far the top. Here's a top five example of a site well listed:
Yahoo 49.21%
Excite 17.27%
Google 12.91%
MSN Search 8.55%
Lycos 6.45%

Here's another site not well listed in Yahoo directory but well positioned in all engines.
Altavista 65.94%
Excite 10.86%
Google 7.97%
Yahoo 6.52%
MSN Search 3.62%

And one more not well listed in Yahoo directory.
Altavista 29.64%
Google 22.14%
Yahoo 18.21%
Excite 14.64%
Lycos 7.5%

Although the traffic is satisfactory on all sites, I believe the boost in a Yahoo listing would send the traffic up further. Although, not necessarily through the roof.
I believe volume of traffic is irrelevant. Some sites achieve 100k+ hits and others are 100+ hits.

In addition, despite it's good listing in Yahoo, one of the sites has as little as 30% coming from all search capabilities. All the other traffic comes from links on other websites/bookmarks and other methods to achieve site vistors.

I'd still support the notion that a Yahoo listing is a valuable asset.

[cfhoney]

Most of our referrals come from Yahoo!

Yahoo: 59%
AltaVista: 19%
Excite: 7%
Infoseek: 6%
Lycos: 6%
And the rest are under 2% each. Not worth mentioning.

We have brand recognition and I assume that is the way people find us. When I try other keywords, I can't find us.
I just requested a change to our listing. Asked for a new category and a second one as well. Maybe that will help people that don't know our name. We'll see.
If it does, I could probably forget we are listed in other SE's given the amount of traffic Yahoo generates.

[CyberSpaced]

My traffic goes like this.....

Google/YahooGoogle/Yahoo - 49.14%
AOL - 8.66%
Netscape - 2.9%
OPD - 2.48%
Go - 1.88%
AltaVista - 1.80%
MSN - 1.45%
Lycos - 0.77%
NBCi - 0.68%
Goto - 0.60%
Dogpile - 0.52%
Ask.com/AskJeeves - 0.50%
Bookmarks - 15.3%
Links - 13%

This only counts the pages that had referrers, or the referrers that showed up. Direct traffic I estimate at about 14%, and a bunch of links traffic comes from non-referring pages as well...

What I noticed was that the minute I entered goto.com, my traffic in 5 other search engines doubled. Anyone who doesn't think that goto.com is worth the money should give it one $50 try and see the difference...

[Horasz]

1.Yahoo 69.30 %

2.AltaVista 11.57 %

3.Lycos 5.42 %

4.Yep 5.14 %

5.MSN 3.56 %

This is the last year.

Right now:

1.Yahoo 78.66

2.Lycos 5.43

3.MSN 4.95

4.AltaVista 4.58

5.Excite 2.53

So i think yahoo it's really the most important site...:)

[DataHawk]

I am really surprised by the numbers posted here. Yahoo is extreamly important to get listed on for my sites. 85-95% of my site visitors come from Yahoo. My catagories are all regional and most of my sites are hotels. I can tell the day a site gets listed on Yahoo when the visitors to the site increase greatly, at least 6 to 8 times more visitors.

[Mike_Mackin]

Welcome to WmW DataHawk

I have been looking at ALL the various numbers above.
The thought occurred to me that ones RANK in the SEs will have a dramatic effect on the percent of traffic a site gets from say "Yahoo?"

If you rank #1 in AV verses #3067 more traffic will flow your way from AV and therefore reduce the Yahoo? percentage.

These number are not complete without a lot more information.

Let me give you an example.
We have a site that gets the following traffic:
goto 79%
findwhat 21%
Yahoo? 0%

Does this mean Yahoo? is no good?
NO
The site is not listed in Yahoo?

[Macguru]

Hi DataHawk,

It is more difficult to achieve good rankings on search engines whith hotel, travel and vacation related sites. The competition is fierce in this erea. You should check your rankings on SE, if your are listed between 31 and 40, you have already lost more than 90% of the audience.

If I take only my Yahoo visitors, roughly 60% of them use regional listing filtering process and the rest go directly to the search box.

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, the competitive area we are all in accounts for a great deal of the differences. Last year however on a very large number of domains in our care, the ODP directory listings out referred Yahoo by about 12-14% (when including the ODP clones at aol, google, lycos, hotbot, and alta).

fascinating thread. Who's next?

[2_much]

Ok...check this out...
This is for a site that is well-ranked all around (except AV)...All for the same keyword...category is not very competitive:

# 1 in search results of Yahoo
# 4 in search results of MSN
# 5 in Google
# 10 in AOL

(2 week period in January)
1. no referral (a lot)
2. yahoo.com/bin/search 2,362 9.7%
3. msn.com/results.asp 919 3.8%
4. msn.com/spbasic.htm 733 3%
5. google.com/search 727 3%
6. aol.com/dirsearch.adp 524 2.2%
7. yahoo.com/search 489 2%
8. yahoo.com/bin/query 291 1.2%
9. looksmart.com/r_search 129 0.5%
10. yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Shopping_and_Services/(directory category)105 0.4%

So in terms of referrals, Yahoo is the uncontested first. This is pretty consistent with us for keywords and categories.

[Alecto]

We're not in any directories yet, so for us Google kicks everybody around the block. Last week went like this:

Google 52%
Goohoo 22% (I expect a rise when Yahoo regoogles)
AV 8%
GoTo 6%

Right now we live and die with Google. If they went down, I wouldn't even want to look at my log files. But it's hard to tell how much more traffic we'd get from Yahoo even if we got into their directory. A lot of people are finding us in Goohoo anyway. Yahoo is like a wall that people have to smash through to find our site in Google, or that's what it seems like to me. But we're just about ready to submit our site to Yahoo, so if it gets accepted, we'll see how that changes things.

[tedster]

>> But it's hard to tell how much more traffic we'd get from Yahoo even if we got into their directory. A lot of people are finding us in Goohoo anyway.

Depending on the site, I see from 2 to 3 times as much traffic from the Yahoo Directory as I see from google.yahoo. It's well worth the effort/expense to get listed, IMO.

[chiyo]

The important thing about Yahoo is the category you are in as Tedster says. We have had our main sites in Yahoo for 5 years now, but we get around 10 hits from Yahoo a day, 400 from Google and 350 from Google/Yahoo.

Still cant work out why we get such poor return from Yahoo. The descriptions are OK, we submitted a long time before paid listings (I'm not sure whether resubmitting and paying will help- dont think so). Maybe its just our fairly niche market and our quasi academic nature.

[Macguru]

Hi Chiyo,

Since I am a newbie to SEO, I take only easy ones, for now. Since Yahoo displays results in alphabetical order of categories, then titles. If your sites is about "Zuchinni" in the "Society and Culture" you wont get a lot of hits from Yahoo.

Since most of my sites are from non profit organisation I still can be listed whitout paying for it. If you think it is possible try a category revision at Yahoo. I did it to weeks ago, received a nono reply mail from them, in my turn replyed to it (from a yahoo account) giving them more explanations on how more rellevant it would be. And I got the non paying site revised within 48 hours.

Here is the French thread for those ho care:

Date:Fri, 09 Feb 2001 15:52:24 +0100
De:<snip!> <<snip!>.yahoo-inc.com>
Affiliation:Yahoo! France
À:Vincent Rivard <<snip!>@yahoo.fr>
Objet:Re: Yahoo! Listing

Bonjour,

La modification mentionnée a été effectuée et elle apparaîtra
dans la base sous 48 heures.

Nous vous remercions encore pour l'intérêt que vous portez
à notre service et nous vous souhaitons le meilleur succès
sur l'Internet.

Cordialement,

L’équipe Yahoo! Canada en français

Vincent Rivard a écrit :

> Bonjour,
>
> Je vous remercie du temps que vous avez pris pour
> étudier le dossier du site de l'Association des
> artistes verriers du Québec. Nous accordons une
> attention particulière à votre répertoire puisqu'il
> nous apporte le plus grand nombre de visiteurs.
>
> L'AAVQ est un organisme sans but lucratif géré par ses
> membres. Bien que son adresse civique soit à Montréal,
> son mandat est national et couvre donc l'ensemble du
> territoire de la province du Québec. C'est pourquoi
> j'ai soumis sous cette catégorie plus large:
>
> Accueil > Exploration géographique > Pays > Canada >
> Provinces et territoires > Québec > Art et culture >
> Associations et Organismes.
>
> Je crois que ce classement est plus pertinent et qu'il
> saura mieux satisfaire les nombreuses personnes qui
> consultent votre répertoire. Si je n'ai pas procédé
> par demande de révision de site existant, c'est une
> erreur de ma part et je m'en excuse.
>
> Merci pour tout.
>
> Vincent Rivard
>
> --- <snip!>.yahoo-inc.com a écrit : > Bonjour,
> >
> > L'adresse Web que vous nous avez soumise
> >
> > <url:http://www.<snip!>.org>
> >
> > existe deja dans Yahoo! Canada en français. Apres
> > avoir verifie
> > le contenu de votre site et la ou les categories
> > dans lesquelles
> > il est liste, nous avons estime qu'il etait
> > correctement
> > repertorie. Si vous avez des difficultes a retrouver
> > un site
> > specifique, effectuez une recherche a travers son
> > titre.
> >
> > Si vous avez des questions sur la classification ou
> > les
> > commentaires actuels de votre site, n'hesitez pas a
> > nous envoyer
> > un message.
> >
> > Amicalement,
> >
> > L'equipe de Yahoo! Canada en français
>
> =====
> J'aime le beau
> J'aime le simple
> J'aime le rare
> J'aime le Mac
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!? -- Pour dialoguer en direct avec vos amis,
> Yahoo! Messenger : [fr.messenger.yahoo.com...]

[chiyo]

Thanks MacGuru,

I will look at our listings again and see if a change of category may help. One site starts with "A" so no problem with listing within the category...

[JamesR]

Welcome to the forums Alecto. "regoogles" has to go down as word of the year in my book. Thanks for the information.

[mivox]

Well, the last week or so, I've seen Google pull ahead of everyone else in our referrals (www.google.com, not Yahoogle)... don't know if Google changed their algos in our favor, or if everyone changed them against our benefit, but our traffic seems to be holding fairly steady in overall volume.

[Alecto]

Thanks for the welcome JamesR. I really enjoy this place. Tons of info!

[lizzie]

Sorry to sound stupid, but what is the difference between Yahoo and Google-Yahoo? I thought it was just the latter now.
If I pay Yahoo for a listing they can reject it and keep my money, right? I have a very well done and professional looking page which is still a doorway page for an affiliate program when you look closely at it. Would I be wasting my money to submit It to Yahoo?