Re: Yahoo and Google

From: David Yancey <dyancey_at_adjunction.com>
Date: Fri 20 Feb 2004 12:36:08 -0600

Kevin Lee is certainly one of the top positioning and SEM experts, and his
firm serves a range of relatively sophisticated SEM clients, so his warning
re: a potential 25% to 40% fall-off in traffic needs to be taken seriously.

In our specific case, however, traffic for our new consumer-oriented search
site www.vivante.com has taken only a 5% hit or thereabouts based upon the
Yahoo changeover. We do not think this will worsen. Our proprietary
platform is designed to be just as friendly to the Yahoo crawler as it is
to Google's and others, so we expect to achieve high rankings in Yahoo just
as we do for our more carefully targeted search phrases in Google. Indeed,
spot checks so far in the last 48 hours indicate that we are well up in the
"new" Yahoo pages.

Sites who find themselves suffering from Yahoo's dropping of Google results
need to take the obvious steps:

- Consider paid inclusion in Inktomi (if not already done).
- Watch your referrals stats closely. If you have not invested in a
serious traffic analysis discipline, then this is now an even higher priority.
- Look for targeted alternative paid search sites where you can spend a
small sum to get more exposure among your most desirable visitors and
prospects.
- Re-examine your site for any variances that might be treated differently
by Yahoo's "Slurp" crawler than by Google's spider.

After Yahoo's transition is stabilized, you should do frequent spot checks
of your more important key phrases and terms, comparing how they rank in
the two respective engines. This may quickly point up cases where Yahoo is
ranking your page using different criteria.

Above all, do not panic, and be patient. This is a positive
development. Finally, there is a well-funded, serious crawler competitor
to Google! This is long overdue, and will be better for the web, the
users, and most of the sites in the medium to longer term, even if you are
taking a hit just now.

David Yancey
www.vivante.com
"Web searching *your* way"

  




Received on Fri Feb 20 2004 - 12:36:08 CST