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Boricua
10-31-2004, 11:01 AM
I recently took a look at where my search engine traffic is coming from. Here are the results for 3 sites that get at least 15K search engine referrals per month:

Site 1
=======
Google 92%
Ask Jeeves 5%
Yahoo 2%
MSN 2%

Site 2
=======
Google 74%
Ask Jeeves 8%
Yahoo 13%
MSN 5%


Site 3
=======
Google 75%
Ask Jeeves 2%
Yahoo 17%
MSN 7%


I wonder how these numbers stack up against what other people are seeing. As I look at the numbers, these sites are clearly very dependent on Google. Has anyone been successful at achieving more balance?

Emancipator
10-31-2004, 11:11 AM
I dont have my numbers since i just got my own webserver setup but my order is

google - 90% +
msn
aol
yahoo

paul
10-31-2004, 11:55 AM
Google 46%
Yahoo 23%
MSN 18%
aol 6%

Boricua
10-31-2004, 12:04 PM
This article (http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156431) from Search Engine Watch reported the following breakdown of search traffic in the month of May 2004 for some of the major players:

Google: 36.6%
Yahoo: 26.6%
MSN: 14.4%
AOL: 12.8%

The results of that study leave me with this question: how does one get Yahoo traffic? I'm getting some Yahoo traffic, but nothing approaching the Google/Yahoo ratio of (approx.) 1.4/1 reported in the study.

Does being in Yahoo's directory have a big impact on traffic?

Cutter
10-31-2004, 05:31 PM
This is interesting. My first site gets more Yahoo traffic than Google traffic. This site got into Yahoo right away but took a month or two to get indexed by Google. However, of the sites I've launched within the past month, nearly all are getting Google traffic already, but none are even indexed in Yahoo.

And none of my sites are in Yahoo's directory.

Cutter
10-31-2004, 05:32 PM
Now that I think about it, I had a few articles linked to on the main pages of several large sites and that got me Yahoo traffic for those search terms almost immediately. But that hasn't worked for any of my other sites.

Boricua
10-31-2004, 07:01 PM
I have several sites that haven't really been promoted yet. I've found that I receive more Yahoo traffic than Google traffic from those sites. However, it seems that once the sites are promoted to a certain level, Google "kicks in" and dwarfs everything else.

It's still a bit of a mystery to me to know what it takes to drive lots of Yahoo traffic to a site.