Here’s something that many people tend to discount in the Search industry - Yahoo.
I was checking out the stats for one of our websites today which I had been optimising about two or so months ago. I hadn’t noticed too much of a rise in traffic but I did see that traffic had been increasing, slowly but steadily since my tweaks. To investigate further I did some digging around in Google Analytics and found that Yahoo and Live (well, not really Live) were sending us decent traffic for once! Take a look at these graphs:
Here is Yahoo…
Here is Live…
However, it’s quite easy to see who the real breadwinner is here. Just take a look at what Google gave us over the same period, will you…
Regardless, Yahoo’s contribution of traffic to our site is still not to be sneezed at. Of the 2,100 visitors it sent us, they accounted for 16,000 page views that period. This is all up from a trickle of traffic which they used to send our way. Here are some of the things I’ve done which may have impacted the way they rank our site in their SERPs:
- Added Content relevant Headings to pages
- Added XML and TXT site maps
- Improved the internal linking structure with a HTML based sitemap consisting of less than 100 links per page.
- Tidying up the code on the site a little.
I can’t say for sure whether these changes did anything, but I have no other explanation for the rise in organic traffic. What do you think?
Do you use ‘Yahoo!’?
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No Robert, I don’t, I have to admit I go straight to Google!
This is good information you are giving to us, and I’m happy to subscribe via.RSS
You know if we all pooled our knowledge, we could storm the blogosphere. Look for my articles on Belief Systems (soon).
Carol Webb
August 23rd, 2007
There is nothing strange that many people uses Yahoo. I think it is a very good search engine. Nowadays the leaders are: Google, Yahoo and MSN. And 50% of leaders traffic goes through Google, other half - through Yahoo (30%) and MSN (20%)
Ukrainian
August 25th, 2007
Google really did turn into a great search engine, and boy did they destroy the competition.
Remember when Hotbot, Lycos and Excite were major players?
mlankton
August 25th, 2007
Hahaha, those were the days…
I remember using Altavista and Metacrawler mainly. I didn’t start using Google until 2001!
I used to sort through pages and pages of SERPs and never found what I was looking for. I think Google does a great job right now. It really sets a high standard for other engines to reach.
Robert Kingston
August 26th, 2007
Well, depends on the country. In some countries yahoo gets virtually no market share, while in others it often reaches a substantial share (up to 30%). Anyhow, better concentrate on google…
jews
August 28th, 2007
I’m with “Jews”. In most cases Google is the best choice.
Jew
September 3rd, 2007
Well, i admit i use Yahoo for my email because i like their interface. I found it more user friendly than the gmail. For searches, then i go for google.
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September 18th, 2007