So, Yahoo! just went through with what looks like an update. I am seeing link counts down across the board. For example, two days ago my main site, www.webmarketingnow.com had just over 30,000 links according to Yahoo! Site Explorer. Today? 25,000. That’s a drop of 1/6th, which is pretty significant. My affiliate sites have seen about the same.

What about traffic?

Good question. Just 6.22% of my traffic comes from Yahoo! (organic). Compare that with 5.05% for MSN (organic) and Google’s lion share of 54.4%. The remaining 35% is PPC, direct or referral traffic. By the way, that’s a pretty healthy ratio 65/35. You don’t want one area to be too dominant (more than 75%) of your referral traffic. And you also don’t want to count on pure PPC for all your traffic either.

Back to Yahoo! … what other changes have taken place? Over at Webmaster World they are discussing canonical issues, which are present mainly because their bot, Inktomi, continues to be ignored and it really needs an update … or just kill it altogether an go to a PPC dominated page with directory results as the organic listing. What Yahoo! is doing with organic search right now just isn’t working. When it was working correctly, they were either using Google to feed their results or using their directory listings.

This isn’t rocket science. Spammers aren’t going to pay $299.00 a year to be listed – real businesses will.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under SEM/SEO, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.