Is Yahoo Becoming a Better Source of Search Engine Traffic?
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In the beginning of the month, Loren Baker reported on what appeared to be an algorithm update in Yahoo’s search engine. I had my fingers crossed but didn’t have my hopes up too much, as Yahoo had sent me less than 15oo visitors in all of 2007. But his question got me curious and I went and checked my referral stats.
Sure enough, my traffic was up significantly from Yahoo. Most of it was because Shannon wrote a wonderfully optimized post entitled “Halloween Treat: Rice Krispie Pumpkins” which was ranking #1 on Yahoo for all sorts of related searches and we had a nice spike right before Halloween because of it. (Yeah, Shannon rocks!)
But after a measly <1500 referrals, I was super-excited to see that Yahoo had sent our site 112 visits just on October 30th alone.
I forgot about it again until today when I decided to check on Yahoo again - was this a fluke, or is Yahoo indeed starting to rank my blog better lately?
Indeed it has:
Although traffic has obviously died down because Halloween is over, you can see that just since September 1 Yahoo is sending more traffic, more consistently, and since late October, the average is much higher.
Will Yahoo ever become the traffic driving force that is Google? Maybe, but not anytime soon. But I am THRILLED to see that Yahoo is finally indexing my site better - and if it is due to an algorithm update, I wonder if they have made some adjustments to index blogs more accurately in their search engine page results? It would make sense, as Yahoo seems to be steering themselves more into the social media space and (depressingly) away from search.
What is your recent history with Yahoo - have you seen an increase in the last month or so?
Sparkplugging Founder Wendy Piersall is dang passionate about helping people start & grow a business while maintaining life balance (somehow).
Dawud Miracle has one focus: to help you get it. The it? How your website, and blog, can change the way you do business. You can find out more at 
Teresa Morrow manages online book publicity and event promotion for authors, speakers and writers with her company 
Okay, this comment may very well advertise my lack of knowledge, but how do you check stats with Yahoo?
Our traffic is up significantly as well in Yahoo lately, well over 150%. It looks like they finally found us!
It would really be nice to have another search engine for strong referrals other than that engine-who-shall-not-be-named.
Melissa– The easiest way I know of is Google Analytics, especially since they’ve updated their interface, it’s now a LOT more intuitive than the “classic” interface, even though it took me WEEKS after they switched to fall in love with it. I’m hard to change on things like that.
Wendy– I also got a HUGE (for my blog) spike on October 30th, to the tune of 186 Yahoo hits, all for the term “Characteristics of Successful People”.
That MADE my day! Hysterical!!!
Melissa, if you don’t have Google Analytics, you need to check whatever stats package you use, and drill down into the sites that refer traffic to you to find Yahoo. Hopefully your stats package will show a graph to display trends over time, and then you can see how much Yahoo has sent in the past and how much it is sending you in the last couple of weeks.
Bill, the only way I can explain your traffic spike from Yahoo is that they likely ran a new story about some successful person, and then gave their readers a link to a search for more info on “Characteristics of Successful People”.
If only I could be so lucky with a feature on mom bloggers making money, eh?!
Thank you! Now I need to figure out how to make Rice Krispie Turkeys!
I have had sites launched for a few months and left them to see which engine found them first. Every time without exception it was Google. I had to ‘do’ something to get Yahoo’s Slurp to even bother trying to find them!
My yahoo numbers jumped in October by about 60%.
My number one search engine is and always has been, MSN, which produces approximately four times as much traffic as Yahoo.
Yep, I’m getting a few more hits from Yahoo as well. Google actually started sending me a lot of traffic a few weeks back but then it sort of stopped. I have no idea what’s going on. I just know many changes are happening.
Helene - that’s fascinating that MSN is tops. Interestingly, I get a good MSN showing at my personal blog in which I write, ironically enough, about the near-divorce I experienced with my husband.
I wonder if MSN has more female users or if there is some other reason that personal stuff does well on their search engine?
Yahoo has been loving some of my sites lately too. It’s fun. Got some really great keywords and the traffic is wonderful.
But then my philosophy has always been to enjoy whichever search engine is giving me the traffic. Sure hasn’t been Google of late.
My Yahoo traffic is up slightly and the domain still ranks in the top 5 as a traffic referral…
1. StumbleUpon
2. Google
3. Problogger (Whaaaaaa…..)
4. Yahoo
5. Twitter
So yeah, I think that’s fair.
Good point you have raised here. I have seen Yahoo popping up quite often in my stats. Good one!
For some reason, if I search for my domain name minus the .com part i.e. “marketing tools review” I’m ranked on the first page on Google and MSN but nowhere to be found on Yahoo.
Looking at my web stats, I see Google and MSN spidering my site a lot more than Yahoo (about 6x less than the other two). I don’t see any significant traffic from Yahoo at all.
I almost never use Yahoo for searching. But I have seen discussions on several forums that the new suggestion feature of Yahoo! search is very good.
The traffic I get from Google and Yahoo have always been about equal and I have not seen any significant difference. For some reason I get more traffic from MSN.
As for crawling Google and Yahoo are similar but MSN crawls 3x less.