How many of you rank higher with Yahoo than Google

Higher ranking, lower overall page saturation in Yahoo for us. Overall, it is pretty close. MSN hands down seems to blow both away however.

 

My site, www.tattoofinder.com, does MUCH better in Yahoo than in Google. We get about 4 times the amount of traffic simply off 6 and 10 result positions for two (very important) keywords. The ONLY thing I can figure out that may have helped us with this ranking on Yahoo for these "key" keywords(as I am new to SEO and just starting to do this type of work) is "sponsoring" our category placement area for some time. Does this seem logical?

As I'm learning about SEO, I'm finding Google much easier to optimize for than Yahoo. So I'm focussing on Google and hoping what I do there has good effects on Yahoo and the others, too.

 

I'm ranking high on google but my ranking on yahoo is real low.

 

One of our sites, www.CardsShoppe.com, had excellent search term positions on Google and Yahoo until three days ago. Then the bottom fell out with Yahoo. We have now lost about 50% of our good search term postions on Yahoo, but maintain our positions on Google.

Anyone have any ideas what Yahoo did?? And, are the through with their adjustments?

Thanks

 

We have found Yahoo! next to impossible. They take foreeeeever to index anything and don't manage to crawl nearly as deep as Google. Currently we get over 10 times as many visits from Google as we do from Yahoo! and yes we have done our best to optimise for Yahoo! including flattening thousands of URLs. That was almost three months ago and barely seemed to have any effect at all.. but then again, they have barely managed to index any of those pages either.

My personal theory is that smaller sites do better in Yahoo! because they don't have the same competition from deep pages as they would in Google. It's just a hunch though, but makes sense if you consider that there's at least 100,000 less pages from our site to compete with for starters

 

My site ranks better in yahoo & AV than on google

_________________

Arun

High Paying Adsense keywords :: Get paid for signups

 

I agree with daamsie that Yahoo is much slower than Google to rank new sites and pages.

On Wednesday, I just got a keyword ranking in Yahoo for a site I put online on 11 May.

This is the only site I have which currently gets much more traffic from Yahoo that from Google. Why? Because it's spammy as all heck. It's a test site, and it shows that Yahoo is incredibly vulnerable to on-page spam.

 

Yeah I completely agree. As a general thought both Yahoo and MSN seem to depend alot more on on-page factors. Thus, they are much easier to SPAM since it takes alot longer and alot more work to build inbound links, which Google weighs alot more heavily than the other two...

 

Sadly though, optimising on-page only works when they manage to actually index the page.. Most of my pages listed on Yahoo! are ranked quite well - the trick is getting them listed in the first place!!! If anyone's got any tips ??

 

Sites that went online after the Site Match program went in to effect seem to take a long time to get spidered. For the next 4-5 months, even with a decent amount of backlinks, bot visits are infreqent and don't go very deep into the site. After that, the bot makes very regular visits. However, I see a lot of attempts to retrieve old, deleted pages.

As far as getting the site in the index (and ranked) after the bot visits, that can take quite a bit of time. Updating the index is sporadic. We have sites with a lot of fresh content, and sometimes the cache pages are a month behind, every now and then they are current.

Our pre-Site Match sites seem to be updated more frequently. Then again, this could be unique to our portfolio.

My best guess? Site owners that pay for Site Match have their pages updated and in the index more frequently than non-subscribers. According to Site Match terms and conditions, this is the way it is supposed to happen. Can anyone confirm this?

 

I get about 20 times as many people from google as from yahoo. Although a bunch of that (maybe 50%) is from adwords. I haven't really bothered to do much yahoo optimization, and haven't signed up for overture. MSN is nothing but a pittance for me.

 

I'm not sure when the Site Match program started, but our site has been online for over two years. Or do you mean pages that went online after the Site Match program started??

 

I rank great on yahoo (top 3 for all my main keywords) and terrible in google.

 

I was referring to domains that went live after Site Match rolled out.

There is one thing that most people fail to take in to account when they talk about receiving more traffic from one search engine over another - if you have good rankings in Search Engine A and lousy rankings in Search Engine B, it is a certainty that you will receive more traffic from Search Engine A.

To do a real comparison of search engine traffic, you will need to look at identical or similar keyphrases that have the same relative search engine ranking. For example, one of our real estate sites has a rank of #2 for our primary keyphrase on both MSN and Yahoo. During the past month, MSN has delivered slightly more traffic on this phrase.

You can break things down even further by studying the demographics of your site visitors. For example, which cities and states do they live in? Are MSN visitors more likely to look at the high end items on your site? Are Yahoo visitors more apt to be window shoppers rather than take action by contacting you or making a purchase? It's fascinating stuff when you study this over time.

 

So, please pardon my ignorance, when was Site Match rolled out then? Our site was around before Yahoo! had their own results; I presume Site Match came in after they introduced their own search.

My main problem with Yahoo is not the traffic from individual search terms, but the simple lack of pages indexed. Google has indexed over 100k of our pages, while Yahoo is just over 10k pages. That's 90K+ pages that aren't even having a chance to compete.

 

Me thinks that Yahoo is a bit more conservative when it comes to what they index. A bad thing from an SEO perspective, but great from a search perspecitve. Google is getting full of a lot of irrelavant crap lately... Not as bad as some, but getting worse. I would not be surprised if Yahoo has a bit more human intervention than Google.

 

If I remember correctly, Site Match officially rolled out sometime at the end of the first quarter or early second quarter in 2004. But again, this is only a theory based upon my portfolio of sites.

As far as Y! indexing the rest of your pages, what do your logs show? Do they show that Y! spidered the pages and has not placed them in your index? What type of content is on the pages that are not in the index? Products? Forum pages? Information pages?

If it hasn't started already, I think that search engines will have to cut down on indexing forum pages in their general database and classify them as research pages in separate search engines. Why? Search engines are big business, and the relevancy of results definitely play a factor in an SE's ability to drive revenues.

While many forums may offer great information, these pages are generally not what web surfers expect when they search for "blue widgets". Of course, an algo can be altered to move forum pages down in SE rankings, but the pages still take up database space and processing power for each SE company.

As the internet continues to grow and grow, SE's will have to make major changes to provide what they consider to be the best information for their users.

 

After yahoo slurped my youth forum a couple of hundred which ways at once, the yahoo serps caught up with google and are now back under my spell. Interestingly, we took back first place in msn at about the same time.

 

The pages are mostly accommodation listings - in several different languages. Of course, to me they seem very relevant to the phrases we are targetting. There are also a lot of forum pages, but I disagree with you that searchers don't like finding forum pages. In fact, when I do searches, I am usually very happy to find a forum thread on the topic - it provides a great way to get information on that particular 'widget' if you like. Maybe that's just my personal search habit though.

As for logs, I haven't kept an eye on which exact pages are being spidered and which ones get indexed -- too much bother for me trying to keep an eye on 100k+ pages In fact, our stats analyser (Livestats) doesn't seem to recognise Yahoo's Slurp, making it particularly difficult. Downloading the log files themselves would be madness at up to 100mb a day.

I very much doubt Yahoo are doing this to make their search engine more relevant - my guess is they simply don't have the processing grunt to deal with the multitude of extra pages. When we last launched a set of new pages (tens of thousands of translated pages), it took Google a few days to get the first few hundred indexed. It took Yahoo about a week to get 10 of those pages in the index. Since then Google has indexed 75,000 of those pages and Yahoo! has managed to index 600. These pages are all of the same type (accommodation at a city/country/region level) - so it makes no sense that it is a particular type of page they are trying to cull.

Re: the site match theory - I don't think it has anything to do with this, because the site has been online since 2002.

Regarding visits from different SEs; we rank 2nd on Google, Yahoo and MSN for 'travel forums'

Last weeks visits from that particular term
Google: 61
Yahoo: 16
MSN: 6

I think it pretty much reflects how much each search engine can deliver. I know that back when Yahoo! still used Google results, they were generating about a 5th of the traffic that Google was. If only we could get a fifth of the traffic off them now !

 

I do, and I rank even higher in MSN Beta... especially for "REfrozen", I have 100% of MSN Beta's front page