Google traffic up, Yahoo traffic flat, any ideas why?

One of my sites has had a clear, statistically-significant trend of upward google traffic over the past 6 months. Google makes up, of course, most of the search traffic, but Yahoo, the second-up search engine, is still a substantial chunk of it.

I've noticed that the Yahoo traffic has been basically flat (some ups and downs but nothing statistically significant) over the same six-month period.

I have a lot of keyword data but I don't know what to look at. The engines do send traffic from somewhat different keywords and the rankings are different but I don't know where to start.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Any idea how to figure out what's going on?

 

I'm not getting as much traffic from Yahoo either, so I'm interesting in what others have to say as well.

 

Take a look at Yahoo Search Clues to see how your target keywords are performing.
http://clues.yahoo.com/

My guess is that you've probably moved up in Google SERPs hence the increase in traffic, while Yahoo/Bing serps have stayed flat.

You may also have some decent rankings on Google for specific keywords but have no rank on Yahoo/Bing. Yahoo (powered by Bing) seems to be heavily influenced by decent backlinks, and they are also slower at indexing. So if you don't have a few backlinks to support some of your keywords the chance are your pages are not shown anywhere on Bing/Yahoo whereas they have a decent rank on Google. I have this issue with a couple of keywords; good rank on Google but no rank on Yahoo/Bing.

 

Well, first off, Google changes and adjusts their algorithm like most girls change clothes. Yahoo and Bing truly are playing catch up with this. But you have to do more link building with Yahoo and Bing.

It doesn't matter what you are doing, you have to realize the differences between them. What works for one doesn't always work for the other, but there is a bit of a conversion difference too with the traffic from one to the other with ppc traffic.

 

I agree with him

 

Yahoo traffic is stable since Yahoo doesn't punish or reward any site for no reason.

 

You might have optimized your website only for google now for Yahoo. Both Google and Yahoo algorithms are different so you need to follow or sum up ways in order to get ranked well in all search engines. Try to know what works well with Yahoo

 

same happen to me, i believed it due to no increase on the yahoo search user

 

Thanks everyone.

My experience is that google generally doesn't penalize sites for no reason. I've gotten a google penalty once, on one site, for using hidden text that was in my page due to an error in my javascript (no malicious intentions). When I fixed it, google quickly removed the penalty. I was active on the google webmaster forums some time ago, and I noticed that many of the webmasters posting there complaining about penalties were actually using quite a few black-hat techniques. If you steer clear from these, your chance of a penalty is very low, and, like what happened with me, you should be able to work it out relatively easily.

 

And this what my problem also in yahoo. The ranking seems not steady and low traffic. It looks like lots of us experience same problem with yahoo ranking.

 

Clues will help a lot. Thanks @hhsaus for sharing tht

 

I gave up on yahoo. Trying to keep up with google is a fulltime job without adding another search enigne in the mix. Plus google give me plenty of traffic

 

It's a very bad strategy. All of your eggs are in the same basket. When G drops your rankings for no reason you should have another place to go.

 

I dont mean to sound conceded but ive never had any issues with google dropping my rankings for no reason. The thing is, if google drops your rankings there is always a reason for it. But if you build quality sites with tons of information and your not just trying to sell something than you shouldn't have a problem.

 

You can't know all of the reasons why your site receives traffic from G.
Of course there should be some reasons when that traffic was lost. As webmasters, we can never know all of the reasons how G ranks the search results. We can only guess some of the reasons which we read somewhere like "quality sites", "tons of information", "not just trying to sell something", etc.
Since I can't know all of the reasons then I can say that rankings can drop for no reason.