Another Drop in Yahoo Organic Traffic

Frankly I'm very disappointed in my results from what I've seen coming from yahoo in the last year. I was getting ~6000 unique/day from yahoo and now I'm only getting ~600.

At the same time I was getting ~2500 from google and now I'm getting ~5500. Good increase, but the decrease in Yahoo traffic doesn't make up for it.

I am already sending sitemaps and I even paid for inclusion in the yahoo directory. Any suggestions?

Good grief that's a drop in Yahoo. When did that drop happen in relations to you installing VBSEO?

I've seen the complete opposite. My Yahoo traffic went up and my Google traffic didn't change.

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

Good grief that's a drop in Yahoo. When did that drop happen in relations to you installing VBSEO?

I've seen the complete opposite. My Yahoo traffic went up and my Google traffic didn't change.

April 06. It took yahoo a long time to get rid of my old URL's and index the new ones. Right in the middle of that change was the drastic drop in SERP's in yahoo.

Since you installed in Sept. 2006, your chart shows that your Yahoo traffic steadily rose throughout the next 5 months with vBSEO, from 3,000 to 6,000 (+3,000 gain). Google did not increased as quickly.

There could have been a Yahoo algorithm update in January, or the arrival of a competitor who pushed you from some of your traffic generating positions.

Did you make any changes to your site in the month or two prior to January 2007?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Since you installed in Sept. 2006, your chart shows that your Yahoo traffic steadily rose throughout the next 5 months with vBSEO, from 3,000 to 6,000 (+3,000 gain). Google did not increased as quickly.

It's almost as if yahoo liked duplicate content. As soon as it caught on that I wasn't using my old URL's anymore (300 redirects) it finally dropped them.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

There could have been a Yahoo algorithm update in January, or the arrival of a competitor who pushed you from some of your traffic generating positions.

yes, there def was a major shift. The SERPS for my old URL's did not carry over to the new ones. Or at least it seems that way

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Did you make any changes to your site in the month or two prior to January 2007?

Rewrote the archive URL's (which yahoo indexed a lot of)

I can't possibly see how things are getting worse with 575k pages indexed in yahoo (at one point there was 1.5mil, but a lot of this was duplicate content)

How many links does Yahoo report you having?

i installed in june 06, and I STILL have old urls in yahoo.

yahoo just, well, sucks.

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

How many links does Yahoo report you having?

Originally Posted by tavenger5

I can't possibly see how things are getting worse with 575k pages indexed in yahoo (at one point there was 1.5mil, but a lot of this was duplicate content)

Tavenger5, I had the exact same results with Yahoo!. I went from 400-500 per day in January 2007 to ~200 per day on 1-19-07 and then even lower to around 75 per day in early March.

Originally Posted by tavenger5

That's not links, that's pages indexed. How many links does Yahoo say you have pointing to your site?

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

That's not links, that's pages indexed. How many links does Yahoo say you have pointing to your site?

oops! except from domain - 154,406 to the main page 168,161 to entire site.

That number seems a little off to me though. Google is reporting half that.

Yahoo is a lot more forgiving in what it considers a link back to your site than google is.

btw, I noticed a similar pattern with ask.com dropping in hits recently.

Sounds strange. You know usually when we evaluate search engine positioning, we think in terms of what strategies am I employing, and how are they working.

One thing that we overlook, that might be related in this case, is what are our *competitors* doing? Although we might implement a successful SEO strategy and see (let's say) 20% growth in visitors, this could be diminished in the future, NOT by our own SEO being evaluated differently, but (instead) by a competitor who gets some form of boost.

Let's say for instance a competitor gets featured on a television show (we've had a few customers that have been featured as such). This causes them to get a lot of short-term attention, and may generate 100s of linkbacks from bloggers and other sites that discover them through the tv program, like what they do, and start linking to them.

The result could be that they get a big boost in the search engines from the added new linkbacks. If they get enough of a boost to displace you a few ranks on thousands of terms, you could see a real reduction in hits, even if your SEO strategies are and continue to be successful.

With that said, have you noticed any new competitors emerging? One way to identify them would be to find terms that you get a higher amount of traffic for on a regular basis. Then see if the monthly volume for them has dropped off significantly. Then do a search for those terms and see if you can find a particular site that is displacing you. If so, then you can try to determine what's different about this site. If you are familiar with it from previous times, then what has changed? If not, review it. What are they doing differently from you?