Warning: Your Yahoo Search Traffic is Going Away Next Month
Thursday, July 15th, 2010
Yahoo to transition to Bing search results very soon.
It’s time to stop talking about Yahoo search rankings and the traffic the search engine delivers to your site. Starting as early as next month, no one will care how well you’ve tricked Yahoo into ranking your site well.
Today Yahoo! sent out a communication to its advertisers telling them about the transition of organic search results to those of Bing. According to the email:
Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.
If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change.
I often see people brag about how their minisites or mass-produced web sites rank high on Yahoo and get traffic as a result. As soon as the changeover occurs, all that will matter is how well you rank in Bing and Google.
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OUCH! Exact match domains have always had an easier time ranking at Yahoo than at either Google or Bing. And often even relatively new sites with some content and an exact match domain would rank. Now unique fresh content & SEO efforts will become increasingly important… The minisite development services will suffer.
@Leonard
We see the opposite. Bing has always done does best for us for matching our domains.
Yes, Bing is notorious for ranking exact match domains with very little content – even 2nd tier TLDs such as .info .biz etc, so the Yahoo move will bring more traffic to people who own these types of sites, not less.
I think there is a greater influence in Yahoo based on my studies and sites…expect one of the SEO firms will probably release a statistical analysis…
I’ve had minisites ranked in the top ten at Yahoo and didn’t matter at all.
Don’t waste your time optimizing for Yahoo or Bing. They will only continue to loose market share and mind share.
Google won. End of story.
I disagree Rob…..I almost use Bing exclusively as I think the results are better.
I am hearing regular surfers say they like Bing as well.
Bing does seem to put big weight on exact match domains. I’ve noticed this many times.
FYI I have numerous alt TLD sites which rank page one at Yahoo for their keywords but do not rank nearly as well at Bing & Google.
… which just serves to point out again that the only thing certain about SEO … is its uncertainty.
SEO will be/is being killed by the search engines.
They don’t want any SEO going on.
@Leonard
Good point. I wasn’t referring to alt TLDs, just dotCom.
google is all that matters
every person i know (outside domainers) has mentioned google once, thrice etc.
none of them have ever mentioned bing, or yahoo come to that
in business discussions, seo, sales and eveything else, the big g is discussed, never bing, occassionally yahoo
Question is:
Can Yahoo run anything independently?
They let someone else recently start doing their real estate ads…
Match.com is now doing their popular personals…
With all the recent movement of Yahoo…. I think Yahoo will vanish soon or later…..
@ battle of hastings – when Bing and Yahoo are combined, you’re talking about 20%-30% of the search market. I’d pay attention to that.
It seems to have happened earlier. Tonight I got online to check some yahoo rankings compared to Bing and they were identical for the first 2 pages (as far as i went) for three separate search terms.
Oh well…
Bummer for me=)
Troy
@ troy – they’re currently testing it…