The Y effect - G's dominance is gone

Since Y switched I see a great shift to a more dispersed base of visitors comming from se's and dir's.

Below is the last stats for about 3 weeks compared to last quarter 2003
- site is travel UK -

Google 42.6 % Qrt IV 2003 65.2%
MSN 23.9% 15.3 %
Yahoo 19.5 % 9.8 %
Ask Jeeves 5.2 % 2.9 %
AOL 2.0 % 2.1 %
AltaVista 1.5 % 1.4 %
and a rest of about 30 others

Traffic grows steadily. There have been effects by G updates but not significant which may explain the jump at MSN, but we run a broad range of pages to minimise such effects.

I like this very much - an undeniable dependency is diluted.
I like G, don't get me wrong, but I get nervous when one suplier has 75% or more.
M

PS We receive about 50% of our traffic from above (nearly free) PPC and bought in / subscriptions about 25% - rest is bookmark and "friendly sites"

 

Hi Shawn, thanks for your insight - mhhhh - it's weird as I have growth and higher conversion - one can probably analyse this to death - all that springs to mind is that we are in very different markets - you are in a slightly more technical area whereas travel is broader?

Hope someone else is brave enough to confess (show numbers)
Take care
M

 

If any one else is interested in this, my stats are about as follows:

Jan 04
Google = 51%
Yahoo! = 21%
MSN = 5%

March 04
Google = 58%
Yahoo! = 13%
MSN = 7.2%

But as Shawn stated I too am getting more traffic every month, so it's hard to gauge exactly what effect Yahoo's switch has made.

 

Hi, thanks for sharing - looks like our pages which have not been optimised for a specific engine are presently more liked by Y and the purchase of sitemap page listings into Ink (9 month ago) are having a larger effect.
M

 

while the overall traffic increased form nov 2003 to feb 2004 by approx 50%

the ratio Google to Yahoo is very much the same before and now
about 4:1 Google : Yahoo - before and now
it largely depends on market which also clearly can be seen in the Keyword Suggestion Tool data
some keywords are frequent in one and none or different key word combinations in the other of the two - which shows that apparently there are 2 totally or mainly different customer groups using either of the 2 ... sase most likely with others

total i have:
about 35 % direct
about 35 % Google + Yahoo
rest some 1400+ other SE and directories and other referrer links from some 100+ countries

while all figures steadily go up

the ratio remains pretty much the same

 

I dont think its too bad if one supplier gains too much as long as they results are accurate, I mean I hardly get what im after from searching on MSN or Yahoo but google results are almost always correct and give me what im looking for.

 

Here is a tool that gives an interesting comparison of the first 100 sites listed in Google versus Yahoo.

Now previously Yahoo's results were really Google results so the differences that people are seeing now may be in part explained by the difference in the two SERPs. If your site appears high in both Yahoo and Google then your over all traffic will be up. If you site is significantly higher in Yahoo then their share of your traffic will increase. etc. etc. etc.

 

Hi,
yes I agree it is imperfect science but it shows how important a bit of competition and diversity is. It certainly lessens dependency on just one big player.
M

 

Is Yahoo! going to take over the search industry?

Any predictions?

 

My site is not as big as yours probably are... but these are my stats

5 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Google 93%
Yahoo 2.5%
AOL 3%
Unknown search engines 1.2%
MSN 1.2%

 

Since the Switch my Yahoo traffic dropped to nearly zero, and after seeing your numbers, I'm guessing there is an obvious pattern.