Oct 13 2007
Does Yahoo Even Matter Anymore?
By Jeremy Schoemaker
103 comments 
It might take a second for the vid to load… youtube seems super slow today.
BTW the diamond encrusted pimp cup was set to me by Hip Hop Bling. As you can see in the vid its pretty dope so go get yours today!
- 103 Comments. What say you?
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This may be because your target demographic is using Google and not Yahoo.
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Nice video, however.. your background is too dark..
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ya my basement office has very low lighting
I think I got the sound fixed though. I wish they did not discontinue the isignt or I would get one for the office
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We control many sites in different demographics and see a ton of analytics… for instance
Matt-hughes.com - 9 time UFC welterweight champion gets about 14k unique per day
Shoemoney.com - about 20k+ uniq per day
nextpimp.com - about 45k uniq per day
plus some others I cant really disclose yet
I would say we see a lot of traffic in different demos
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With regard to your comment ranking in Google, there are so many variables involved it is certainly hard to generalize by saying it takes “X” number of years to get noticed.
If you’re going after a crowded market with big players, then it may take several years to rank well. However, small niche players may rank almost immediately…in my experience.
On the whole, great video…keep ‘em coming!
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Back on topic
I’m getting very little trafic from Yahoo and MSN..
MSN traffic 10 percent from what Google is sending.
Yahoo 3 percent from what Google is sending.
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Traffic results in past 7 days for keyword ‘Affiliate Marketing’:
Google: 179 uniques
Yahoo: 2 uniques
MSN/Live: 4 uniques
In short - I couldn’t give a shit about MSN or Yahoo, so long as Google keeps me ranked up ‘n’ singing!
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Yahoo…It matters. Its hard to argue with a site that offers it users so much stuff. Does google have fantasy sports? Does google have chat? Does google have the user email base? I don’t use yahoo, so I don’t know the answers to the question “Does Yahoo matter?”. Nuff said…
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Shoe, I experience the same results with my sites. I’m ranked very well for related terms for my sites I mean… it seems to be extremely easy to rank high in Yahoo BUT I barely get ANY traffic from Yahoo and the terms I’m ranked semi-ok for in Google still bring me way more traffic than all Yahoo traffic combined.
And the thing about taking 4 years to get ranked well in Google? well… I can only go by experience and my experience is… you make good content, follow basic SEO and you rank well. For some terms I rank like 1st 10 in Google and I don’t have any amazing backlinks. I think the key as always and as cleshe as it may be is good content. Unique, structured content with good SEO in place… I think people take rankings too seriously, I’ve found by not focusing on them much and focusing more on quality, you rank well automatically.
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this video cracked me up when you said “i really get no traffic from google. and that’s cool, but.. ”
you sounded like the dude in the big lebowski saying “i mean, she owes money all over town, some to known pornographers…and that’s cool. that’s cool, but she just needs money, man.”
yahoo does matter, or at least yahoo answers does. i get so much traffic from answers it’s not even funny. its 200% of what yahoo search sends me. no other search by question site can compare, and google doesn’t have this angle cornered yet. you’re right about jeeves rolling over in his grave because yahoo answers stole his bit.
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Always Jeremy, always on point
I really enjoy your little Saturday shows, you should definitely continue doing them!
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As far as organic I would agree, not much traffic from Yahoo. But for PPC, I get a shit ton of traffic from Yahoo. In fact they are by far my number 1 traffic source. So people are clicking on sponsored ads for sure.
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I think they are both really useful for Search Arbitrage. The clicks have always been cheaper with them too.
I think the traffic you recieve from Yahoo/MSN can largely depend on what niche you are in too.
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Well great show and some good points. My self I am not spending much time on search engine related things untill my site is 100% perfect. Soon I should have my new UBD header then its onward and upward from there.
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Right on point, Shoe. Yahoo has had the advantage of appearing first in the search engine market (1995), but that advantage can only carry you for so long. Google is more relevant and Live has a great user-base that has never learned how to switch their default search engine.
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Same here, almost zero traffic from Yahoo but tons and tons from Google. Relying that much on a single source of traffic doesn’t sit well with me, so I try to do as much as I can to diversify my traffic sources on my different blogs.
Question: are there seo tactics that work better for ranking in Yahoo or something? Occasionally one of my posts will rank high for a certain keyword in Yahoo, and I can never figure out what the factor is. Google usually ranks my stuff high almost immediately, although I know how fleeting that can be.
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Yahoo is not as competent as Google. But it does matter… Like, its search marketing is a great service! PPC is performing great! Also, recently, they have teemed up with Mybloglog.
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I completely agree with you Shoe. If Yahoo doesn’t have the search engine, they are going to suffer. Microsoft is in a similar boat however because their search in my opinion is worse than Yahoo’s, in regards to relevance. Ask’s engine is kind of nice, been playing with it to test some universal search elements, but like you said, they don’t have the market share by any means.
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“I love Yahoo, I love Flickr, and I love… uhh… their other shit.”
EXACTLY. Who knows any of their other stuff? No one because it’s almost irrelevant.
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i like this idea of the “saturday show”.
priceless when you where trying to say for a second that there are a lot of other stuff that you like about yahoo like “flickr and other little shit”
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I don’t think Yahoo really has a future in search, but that’s mainly because of all the other stuff they do. They just don’t have the resources (or the inclination) to focus on search. I’m sure Yahoo will survive, but I think they need some serious restructuring.
So currently, nobody but Google matters for search. But that could still change at ANY time. Remember when nobody thought anyone could surpass AltaVista?
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I think that is because Yahoo Answers ranks well in Google!
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Yahoo doesn’t matter, to ma at least
I see the same on my stats , I rank pretty well on my site but not traffic
Conclusion:
Yahoo makes all there money from the ads on there mail
haha ..IMO
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I hate video posts, YouTube is too slow here!
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This is a question that’s off topic, but I’ve recently started a blog to go along with my site, http://www.soccertraininginfo.com, and was wondering what you thought was the best way to integrate the blog into the site or if I should keep them separate.
Ideally, I’d like to just have one URL to promote and get links back for. And, when I post an article on the blog as opposed to the site, the content of the article doesn’t get picked up as fast, since the blog is new. I posted a link to the goal by Marta in the Women’s World Cup, that was in Google pretty quickly, for terms’ like ‘Marta Goal’, if I would have added it to the blog it might not have gotten picked up: http://www.soccer-training-info.com/marta_goal_versus_usa.asp
Any tips would be helpful. Here’s the link for the blog: http://soccertraininginfo.blogspot.com/.
Enjoy your blog - thanks.
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youtube is fine here… regarding yahoo, they are the no 1 according to alexa. So they do have visitors… tons of them!
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Not really in my opinion – they do not even come close on providing site traffic compared to Google
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Hell laugh at me if you will but I’ll say that even MSN (or Live or whatever they call it these days) still matters! Some of my sites ended up ranking in MSN all of a sudden - I haven’t seen such an increase in sales for a long time! So whatever brings you traffic is good enough for me!
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For my last 500 visitors:
Google - 196 searches - 93.78%
Yahoo - 11 searches - 5.26%
Google Blog Search - 2 - 0.96%
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I get more from upcoming.org and mybloglog.com then I do from yahoo itself
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Does Yahoo matter? Well, for CPC they’re still a great option because they are usually WAY cheaper and easier to place well for than adSense (with their messed up quality score algorithm). As for organic search, does it matter if they matter? Focus your SEO on placing with google and you’ll naturally score well with Yahoo and MSN, at least from my experience. They still provide some traffic, but as a webmaster, it’s probably not worth sweating them too much.
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“Does google have fantasy sports? Does google have chat? Does google have the user email base?”
Do any of those things send traffic to my sites? Nope. Google ranks #2 in Alexa traffic, and nearly all of it is from search queries. Yahoo ranks #1, but they have way more junk traffic from an SEO perspective. Google is the king of search - worry about Google and everything else falls pretty naturally into place.
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Of course it matters. As long as they are not number one in something things will be cheaper there. To me google is mattering less and less everyday. Too expensive to advertise with not enough ROI. Yahoo is a great cheap alternatives. Besides I would never want any other search engines/directories to collapse and leave only one big one.
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Yeah well I would agree to a degree. I think anything that is around and remotely signifigant matters. Any traffic is good. But I think in overall scale terms… Google is realistically the only king to focus on because it’s just so big. But yeah… the others still ‘matter’.
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Most of my traffic (which isn’t a lot) comes in through Yahoo, but that probably is a result that Yahoo is my provider.
On a side note, how early in the morning did you record that video? You seem like you were only on your first cup of coffee.
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At this point I think they do still matter, but it will be interesting to see how things play out in the future. The biggest thing to me right now is the fact that I’m getting a much better ROI on my YSM and Adcenter campaigns than I do in Adwords.
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I stopped trying to do SEO towards yahoo search engines because of that reason I was ranking high on many keywords that would bring in a lot of traffic on google and was getting more from bottom of page then ranked first for search
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I’m still making some good coin off Yahoo Search and I use their finance area to manage all of stock portfolios… so if I had a choice between Yahoo here or not… I’d let them stick around.
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As much as Id like to say yes, the answers no. Most people dont go to yahoo to find something out they go to yahoo to use one of yahoos features like fantasy sports. so not much traffic is coming from yahoo.
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Yes they probally keep google’s prices down in theory but not in practice since the price isnt set. Also google is alot cheaper than yahoo in my experience of getting traffic.
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As long as they continue to allow queries against their search database, they’ll matter to me
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Yahoo hasn’t mattered in 18 month in my opinion. The results over there are a total joke - I rank for search terms that have nothing to do with my website and don’t rank for terms I’m optimized for
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I love Yahoo. I hope they make it!
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Yahoo matters but only after you have masterred google or just trying to get a jump on things.. cause some traffic is better than NO traffic.
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Ya-Who?
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yahoo does matter, you guys are talking about it arent you?
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good point. lol.
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My understanding was that Yahoo Finance was their cash cow. I have sites in over twenty niches and Yahoo only contributes about 10% of search on the best of them. Since Vista was released, Live sends more traffic on most than Yahoo does. But I’d say Yahoo’s seach volume has been negligible for about the last three years and is still dying a long agonizing death. YPN in beta for 3 years hasn’t helped their bottom line either.
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SHOE YOU”RE MISSING SOMETHING BIG
Most of your sites (including this one) are very technology oriented. Everyone knows it’s mostly women, kids, and old people who use Yahoo. If you had a site about knitting or some other non-tech BS, you’d get a much higher level of traffic from Yahoo.
Anyone who knows anything about dmoz, ppc, Adsense, knows not to use Yahoo. Noobs use Yahoo.
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i personally love msn traffic but they should loose a little bit more on terms… there are a lot of words not allowed on msn that are totally fine on adwords… and guess who’s bringing me money?
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I rank really well in Yahoo. In the top #5 for my “money” term. In google for the same term I’m 11-15 (second page!). Still google sends me 10-30x the traffic yahoo does. I don’t know anyone who uses yahoo for search. No geeks, no normal people, no grandmas, no kids, no one. I know a good number of people that use yahoo for mail, answers, website hosting, etc, but not search. I think yahoo search is dead. It’s very sad because we need strong competitors for Google. Otherwise they will squeeze every penny of profit out of every industry.
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I don’t know I’ll find out I’m ranking number 13 for website design and like on page 3-4 for web design in yahoo I’ll compare it to Google Results which all my links are natural none bought just friends giving them to me and I’d imagine from it being on clients sites and etc.
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So i can compare the market share in my niche for that keyword vertical, and I’d have to say that is the most competitive keyword in our marketing.
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I like your blog a lot but I noticed you had a banner for one of yahoo’s campaigns for the last two weeks, and now you don’t. Did they piss you off or something?
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Sure, nobody argues Google is the biggest traffic source out there - but I would rather have MSN or Yahoo traffic than none at all given that sort of choice.
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I only time I visit Yahoo! is when they purchase a site I use like Flickr or MyBlogLog and require my accounts be merged.
Beyond that? No. When they are purchased by Microsoft and site like Flickr & MyBlogLog are merged/killl with Microsoft online properties I’ll move on to Google properties.
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MSN and Yahoo need a merger or aquisition if they are going to compete with Google. Yahoo was on top and helped to make G what it is today. I wonder if they regret that?
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Yahoo matters to some degree, but like you said, I don’t think they’ll be able to stay up to speed much longer with Google. I can’t believe GOOG is trading at $637 right now. That’s crazy! I bought in late (around the $400 mark). Oh well.
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Dude, watch out for that cup, it might have lead poisoning. Whoa, too late, hair already gone, hahaha, just kidding, have a great weekend. Thanx for the advice about yahoo tanking in your view, I agree, I just wish adcenter made their interface a lot better.
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so true! if you take one of yahoo’s most recent questions and google it, the serps pull that one with a freshness time of < 5 minutes. says something about the success of yahoo answers though.
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I still like yahoo, only because it sends me traffic. =p
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I think google is more important especially in search. google trends has an interesting graph, here.
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I agree with shoe. Yahoo has to merge with MSN. YPN never came out of beta, they never fixed any of the issues users reported when testing. They just kicked everyone out and decided to leave YSM for search. Their tools are excellent, but that’s not enough to keep them a float. I rank very well in Yahoo for a few things as well and the traffic is minimal. MSN has actually surpassed Yahoo at this point for us.
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That’s the danger with having one big player though…if they keep you ranked up. If not you’re done. I think we are starting to see some of the same kind of resentment towards Google as we did with Microsoft - expecially with the paid links dabunkle as of late. It’s not good for anyone but Google for them to have a chokehold on search.
My .02
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I couldn’t agree more. I have been able to rank very well in google (and yahoo) with just a little effort for quite a few of my sites. Some have taken longer than others, but on one site I started noticing first page top 5 results in under a month. Five months later and I am number one for that range of keywords. Obviously it has alot to do with having good content and getting exposure from other quality sites that are relevant to your niche (trustrank). I would imagine trying to rank for an oversaturated niche would be a whole different ballgame though.
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I get about 20% of my traffic from Yahoo, especially from international markets. Not ready to ignore them yet….
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I agree. Yahoo gets a lot of non-tech users. The same people who use IE.
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Probably regret it a lot.
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I like yahoo.
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Hey , what happened to the video?
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Oh sorry , scratch that , I didnt see it on summary mode , my bad
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The ranking system for yahoo and msn is very complicated. It goes something like : ini mini miny moe …
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On a couple of my sites Yahoo is the biggest driver, problem is normally at the expense of Google. Find it really hard to get good traffic from them both on 1 website.
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Read alot about the users and quality of visitors from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo has it’s place, if only for the keen 3rd place underdog.
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Yes, Yahoo matters - depending on your niche
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Google generates the most for organic traffic, not only in terms of volume but quality of traffic too. Yahoo does its bit but ranking on Yahoo is totally a mystery. Typically as said above, SEO your site for Google, Yahoo and MSN will follow. MSN really lags behind in terms of traffic but what little traffic I get converts well.
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Yeah I think Yahoo matters (especially after you have been banned from Google).
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I too get most of my traffic from Google, so I would hate for them to ban me. And as others have said while it’s easy to get on the front page for some keyphrases, others take a long time. I think Aaron Wall took over two years to get to the top of google for seo.
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Problem with that is…MyBlogLog doesn’t matter either.
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LOL, sorry that made me laugh. I thought the same thing when I heard Shoe get to that point of the vid.
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Although Yahoo is way behind in terms of search engine results, I think Yahoo as a portal is way ahead of all the others. Yahoo can’t really compete against Google when it comes to PPC, but they generate significant ad revenue from content ads within their portal system. I would also assume their directory listings provide a good source of cashflow for them.
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Yeah… that’s decent traffic. We’re in the same neighborhood traffic wise, but we get about 1/4 of what we get from Google via Yahoo. MSN / Live is way down there for us, and Ask is right there with Live. Rankings are similar across all those engines.
Yahoo can matter, but not as much as anyone else.
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I hear you there. When google switches things up, we can see a $10k/day hit in our sales, or a $10k/day spike. Either way, it makes budgeting sales tough and scary.
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I seem to recall that Google Answers shut down earlier this year. Somewhere that Google gave up, which is amazing.
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Cheaper clicks on Yahoo? Seriously? We have very few on Yahoo that are even as low as our average click on Google, and we get lots of 1 - 2 cent clicks now on Google, which means Yahoo can’t be cheaper.
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Yahoo likes links directly to that page, not to a domain. I’ve found that articles that get external links to them tend to rank well on Yahoo and others don’t.
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Actually, the beta of the new Live search seems decent. We rank #1 for almost everything we target, so it must be good.
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How much of that is searching vs. reading email, reading news, checking stock prices, etc.? They’re primarily a portal.
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Basically google own the marketshare.. but slowly yahoo will make it give them time.
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Shoe- you said that “unless their search engine works and people use it- they have no ad revenue.” Not true. Yahoo is a huge portal and #1 online property. Besides, their search engine doesn’t work that well and they are very profitable.
Also, you must also take into consideration that your users and those on MMA sites are either going to be 1)young, 2)technically inclined, or 3)both. Those users generally prefer Google.
Does Yahoo matter anymore? With the top internet property and a market cap of $36 billion I’d say yes. As long as they remain profitable and maintain their strengths outside of search, they can keep working on their algorithm. If I was them, all branding would be non-search related. Everyone knows they are a portal #1 and a search engine #2.
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I think your a pure nerd. Very annoying. Judging from the way you speak and the thoughts you presented, it just shows me that you don’t really know what you are talking about. What do you mean does yahoo matter? of course it does. It needs to exist to balance google…
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I started optimizing for “Halo 3 Clan” about 4 months ago, and now number I’m number 1 in Google, and number 3 in Yahoo. Here is how the numbers have stacked up so far since Halo 3’s release:
Google: 11,521 uniques
Yahoo: 67
So ya….Yahoo can kiss my ass. Not even ranked in MSN…but at least they make cool video games, or at least Bungie does.
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I reckon the world needs competition especially sites like yahoo which can outcompete if they wanted to google. Hence the need for them.
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i think yahoo can still provide some significant traffic although not as huge as google.
it depends on demographic.
i have a site which i’ve done aggressive SEO on it. after a week, i’ve got lots of traffic from google and minimum traffic from other SE. after few months, probably google detect my site’s link building is too aggressive and G decide to penalize my site. However, at this point of time, i got tons of traffic from yahoo… but still not as much as google but significant enough. My site content is targetting more internationally… approx 70% visitors are out of US.
So i guess yahoo still works good internationally… G is more powerful definitely.
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Yahoo can be good depending on your niche. But for the most part - i dont waste my time on them.
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Ah, my sound card doesn’t work. I’m saving up for a Mac instead of fixing the darn thing.
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…Does Yahoo matter. When Microsoft buys it, you’ll wish you had bought stock in it because the stock price will automatically increase. Google…strong buy. Yahoo…strong buy. Everybody happy. BTW, sell Yahoo immediately after it gets it’s initial surge from being bought by Microsoft. It will only go down from there.
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Hey I think yahoo is pretty important just not to search. Its still the top site visited on the Internet and it helps to give google a little competition. Honestly search is about providing good results that dont annoy people ,Yahoo has failed at that and msn is not far behind. Thats why I just hang out and make sites and what not.
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Of course Yahoo! matters…is it going to produce the majority of your traffick? Probably Not. These days, its important to optimize for Google. There’s no doubt that Google will bring in most of your traffick. As a result of being optimized for Google, I often find that you will also be optimized with Yahoo & MSN too. In fact, you will probably find yourself in Yahoo & MSN, before Google.
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[...] had a video blog recently discussing if Yahoo really matters anymore. I think you have to put it into context. [...]
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Blogistan Panoptikum Woche 40 2k7…
Ein neues Ubuntu sorgt für Begeisterung, Shoemoney philosophiert über Yahoo, SEOmoz gibt Tipps zum Textverstecken und ich bin zu 84 Prozent bloggifiziert. Wie immer also eine ganz normale Woche in Blogistan.
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