A question by XcellenceIT: Does Yahoo! search engine matter any more?

[Cratima]

XcellenceIT team has a question and I decided I should help them by posting the question. Here goes:
Everybody knows that Google is a leader in search engines. But Yahoo! search engine comes right behind him.
Besides my natural question: since all my acquaintances use Google, who are those using Yahoo! search engine after all? , I have another question:
Is it worth it putting efforts in improving for Yahoo! search engine? Google has Sitemaps, Yahoo! has Site Explorer, but is it worth the time to have your web site inserted in both?
OK, you have to make your web site as much W3C-friendly as you can. But Yahoo! search engine friendly?

Frankly, I don't think it's worth the time, but I'm looking for a second opinion.

Any feed-back on this will be greatly appreciated.

[tomcatuk]

I'm always confused as to how you optimize for Yahoo! Surely the basic principles are the same? The only thing I notice (10% of SE traffic from Yahoo!) is they seem to weigh anchor text in links more heavily, and of course they ignore NOFOLLOW so backlinks from blog comments seem to help.

I would imagine eventually Yahoo! will take up on NOFOLLOW. In terms of results placement, I do better on Yahoo! but it's happened by chance rather than plan - I don't read up at all on Yahoo! optimization and probably never will.

[deilenberger]

I have to agree - I can't see why there would be any difference in optimization Google vs Yahoo. Websites should be optimized for PEOPLE first, then for search engines. I also get 10-12% of my traffic from Yahoo - so unless I want to throw away that much business I'd be a fool not to court Yahoo.

[SemAdvance]

Hi

Well lets see if this answers your question

Sites with the most traffic,

1. Yahoo
2. Msn
3. I forget
4. Google

source:ComScore

Now who uses Yahoo?? The people who use Yahoo mail, games which has been a channel killer for ages and others who spend on average 30 minutes on Yahoo daily.

Google which is hovering around 5 minutes page time per user is trying to catch up.

See the first two in the list are portals not search engines. Each has a search engine and its portal residents do not leave the walls to go search on Google.

Another portal you may have heard of and still around since day one

AOL

Yahoo is going nowhere anytime soon, they will continue to be a force in their niche once someone leads them to understand their identity.

Yahoo has typically better conversion numbers among retailers in the $20.00 to $100.00 basket average sales price.

On a closing note worldwide Yahoo is much larger in display advertising than Google.

As was noted only a fool would turn away their traffic.

Peace

[fctoma]

Yahoo is going nowhere anytime soon

I think that this says it all... there is such a shake up in Yahoo with the man stepping down last week.

I've always had great luck optimizing for Google. We've had our domains around for 10+ years, solid top 5 rankings for 90% of our core, heavily competed for terms.

My rule of thumb... optimize for Google and the rest will fall in place.

Sure the stats above show Yahoo and others with more visitors. What those stats do NOT show is Google is by far # 1 for search traffic... excluding the portals. So, if you optimize for Google you should do just fine.

[Akashic]

I've never considered optimising for yahoo but we still rank in the top 5 on yahoo for most of our most popular search terms. I agree with fctoma above ... optimise for the big G and the others will fall into place.

[Matteo]

Besides my natural question: since all my acquaintances use Google, who are those using Yahoo! search engine after all?

The typical internet user is probably someone you don't know (or maybe it's your mom). Like it was said earlier in the thread I would imagine that 70%-80% of all internet users are the unsophisticated. That means they are going to enter the internet and use whatever portal their internet provider gives them That means Google, Yahoo and MSN. That means you need to optimize for all three (though I'll be dogged if I can get optimized for Google Yahoo and MSN at the same time, for some reason I am good with Google and Yahoo, and miss MSN. If I have to miss one I guess it's okay to be missing MSN. ASK is pushing the advertising so they might be growing in popukarity, though I have been unable to find any numbers.

There is a great temptation to look past the great unsophicate numbers, but it is a mistake to do so.

[edhan]

I have to agree - I can't see why there would be any difference in optimization Google vs Yahoo. Websites should be optimized for PEOPLE first, then for search engines. I also get 10-12% of my traffic from Yahoo - so unless I want to throw away that much business I'd be a fool not to court Yahoo.

I agree with deilenberger that we should be optimizing for PEOPLE first since the website is for people to visit. Search engines should come after that. I do believe that once you have done your sites for PEOPLE, somehow or rather, search engines will bring traffic to your sites.

To me, as long as search engines bring traffic to my sites, I will not deny them.

[espectations]

Have a look at sitemaps.org - Home - "Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft."

As far as I know the idea with sitemaps.org is to have one sitemap that you submit to all the engines - I submitted the same sitemap to both Yahoo and Google - last time I checked I could not find a place to submit the url to MSN.

Might save you some time.

Build your site for your visitors and stay within each search engines' guidelines - you will do well. Be careful not to over optimize your site.

And as a last thought - never be compacent, Google is not the only search engine out there.

[DrTandem1]

Let's see, AT&T is partnered with Yahoo. Yahoo is the official default search engine on their tool bar, AT&T has the largest single broadband customer base in the US covering some 22 states along with the largest wireless network...here comes their partnership with Apple and the exclusive iPhone with a real browser. I'm going to take a big risk and say, yes, Yahoo still matters.

Yes, Google is the biggest. So what? Yahoo was the biggest for a long time. Who will be next? The fact is, the big three all produce very similar organic SERPs. Yahoo and MSN are far faster than Google to list new sites and new pages. However, I don't think you can design for one over the other. So, the question is virtually moot.