Well said but the person who owns yahoo i bet doesn't really care. I bet he makes more money then everyone on the forum lol!
Yahoo isn't a search engine. It was never designed as such. Yahoo was built as a directory and it still is that. A directory and a portal, thats why its home page has so much content, because its a portal. Ok? Google is pure search. Yahoo has incorporated search results from Google and others in the past to suplement search when it's directory isn't sufficient for the query searched. So can people please stop bashing Yahoo. I'm not a Yahoo fan or employee but it's important to understand that the two are different. Also, I have travelled in many parts of the world and in many places where the internet is not as advanced as others, Yahoo is still everybody's first search option. This is so in Brazil and many parts of Africa. So while your traffic may not be Yahoo heavy, there are parts of the world where it is. And these parts of th world contribute to that percentage which says Yahoo constitutes 30% of all searches. ALL searches does not mean searches in your country. It means all searches in all countries.
Also, although 85% of my traffic is Google, I find that a higher proportion of Yahoo referrals convert to a sale. For instance, for every 100 search engine referrals 85 will be from Google and maybe 6 to 7 will buy. 7 or 8 referrals will be from yahoo and 3 or 4 will buy. The rest come from others like MSN Live or whatever and none of those ever convert. So almost 50% of my Yahoo traffic results in a sale whereas less than 10% of my Google traffic converts
I find it easier to rank with Yahoo, it still recognises on-page SEO. Google on the other hand is so biast towards incoming links, you need to pay for or spend weeks building incoming links. Hence the sites with the budgets to pay indians to sit there for 8 weeks building links will rank higher than the average joe site. With Google if you don't have the domain and the incoming links for your search term you have a huge battle to rank. Google first 5 results are also extremely predictable - Always the BIG sites in 95% of niches - Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Tv,com, Rotten Tomatoes etc etc. Their listings are easily dominated by the big players.
No matter what, the search engine still contribute around 10% of the total traffic to comes to my site. Anyway, I still use it to read some news update especially on the entertainment section.
OK I must disagree, while Yahoo Does not EVER get the traffic google does, I have ALWAYS had better conversions with yahoo, (much smaller ppc bills too). The same ads on google don't work on yahoo, yahoo has a different more old style and confident users, write your ads to suit normal sensible people instead of "pie in the sky" headlines and your Yahoo ROI will destroy Googles. Guaranteed.
each search engine has its own technique. i dont seen the sites which are shown on the top result of all three major engines. if one site is good in google then it has limited traffic on yahoo or msn.