Hi there I have recently created a forum (3 months old), its not getting very much traffic (the keywords are slowly creeping up the serps) I'm get between 30 - 50 visitors a day, after checking google analytics I notice I get most of my traffic from google (about 30%) about 20% from MSN and the rest from links I have on other quality sites. Looking over my history it looks like I’m getting no traffic from yahoo??? I know between the search engines the traffic should look more like: Google(44%), yahoo(29%), msn(13%), AOL(6%), ASK(5%), other(3%) (as of 07/06 (rounded to the nearest whole number)) I know I’m listed on yahoo, and my serps rank is even higher than google for some words? What do you think this means? Is the google market vastly different to the yahoo market ? Are people that use yahoo less likely to search for things than google users are. What are the real differences in the google and yahoo markets? (sorry just realised this question is probably under the wrong section)
You really should not look at it that way. Yahoo! has its own audience. Google has its own audience. There is overlap between the two audiences, but people who search primarily on Yahoo! tend to have different interests than people who search primarily on Google. A lot of Yahoo!'s search traffic is driven by its content pages: news, entertainment, classifieds, Yahoo! groups, etc. Google has been adding content lately and that may have an impact. But through the years, as Google has grabbed more market share, I have seen people complain that their Google referrals don't match their Yahoo! referrals. It just seems to be that some queries perform better on Yahoo! than on Google. You can try to optimize separately for both engines, but I think that is mostly an exercise in frustration. If you can be sure that your market place really sits on Google, then you should be sure to maintain good rankings in Yahoo! in case your market changes search engine habits, but accept that most traffic comes from Google.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions, I though I may have done something to upset Yahoo for a moment I wonder if there are any good blogs on the different SE markets. Google obviously attracts people who want to use it mainly for the search function (hence there simple layout). Yahoo obviously attracts people who want to see news, mail, finance etc all displayed on one big "home page" I did start out by optimizing (page layout, quality links, content, easy to crawl, etc) and then check my result with google, I assumed this would have also optimized for yahoo A side note [ I’ve also noticed google bumping my serp rank up for most of my kewords over night, and then lowering them again in the morning and for the rest of the day].. very odd??? Anyway thanks all