If you've been on the Yahoo! home page in the last few days, you've seen this phenomenon:
The red box around the Indiana Jones 4 link should, by all rights, take the user to a Yahoo! Movies page about the upcoming film - after all, Yahoo! has had links like these for years on their home page and they've built that expectation into the user experience of the site.
However, this is the page you get when you click that link:
Why? Because Yahoo! is attempting to drive more search traffic via its homepage - one of the web's most popular destinations. We, the users, are meant to understand that the magnifying glass symbol indicates we won't be taken to content, but instead to a search result.
Here's the twist - no one's bidding for advertising on the query they're sending users to - "george lucas indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull" - and, the results are organic; there's no specific attempt to drive traffic to a Yahoo! property from the results (which is hard to believe, as this page would be a perfect result.
If you see Yahoo! having some inflated search query numbers next quarter - don't forget that not all of those were typed into the search box. Additionally, if you're looking to beef up your traffic, watch the Yahoo! homepage for queries they link to and grab those sponsored results (and optimize your pages) as fast as you can. Yahoo! rotates content out every few hours - sometimes even more frequently during the day. It's all the more reason to stay on the cutting edge of popular trends.
I like Yahoo! I really do. But I can't help but look at this as a bit of a pitiful attempt to say, "hey, we're a search engine too!" Their consistently second-rate numbers will now be skewed because of these results - so their ultimate goal here may be to get those numbers posting higher and get people thinking, "hey, Yahoo! is gaining some of the search marketing share, maybe I should spend more on my Yahoo! PPC" or "maybe I should start searching more over at Yahoo!"
I agree with Dr. - this is just going to frustrate people. It doesn't do much for usability. I don't think it will last.
Part of what makes the Yahoo! home page a frequent destination for me is that it is more of a portal than a search engine. You get snapshots of news stories with the ability to read more with only a click, movie listings and trailers, helpful/interesting articles, the weather, etc. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, I think that the highly-customizable iGoogle home page (which I myself have been using more every day) is starting to hack away at Yahoo!'s traffic numbers.
I have been secretely hoping that one day Yahoo will come out of the closet and say " Yes! I am a portal! and not a search engine!"
If and when that day comes, it will liberate Yahoo... with one part of the business it does do really well...
p.s I guess then they would need to optimise for google? lol...
Bigtequilla, you underlined a good point.
Yahoo is the best portal and that is may be it’s great strength on the web. Google is the leading search engine on the web. That is why you have to be careful when you compare them and take that difference into consideration.
I agree - but I think that iGoogle, being a user-customized portal, is taking some of that traffic away from Yahoo! How much is yet to be seen, but my feeling is that Yahoo! is probably suffering now on both fronts with the spreading use of iGoogle.
Yeah, I like iGoogle and I use it a lot but the majority of non-tech people I talk to have no idea it even exists but they know about their Yahoo! home page. iGoogle still has a long way to go in the portal field. Remember also that my.yahoo has offered plenty of customization and personalization options for a long time and I would bet that most users have no idea about that either. They simply go to the Yahoo home page.
Hmm - yes, I think you're probably right. I think iGoogle is great, but I don't know too many non-tech people who use it. I know several who do, but they all happen to be involved in tech-related business.
I did't know it existed! :(
you should use it Maria - it has some really cool features - I tend to use it to pull in various feeds and keep an eye on competitors pricing via their widgets...
I dont' use portals at all, but I may take a look to be updated.What I am using a lot is google reader, it is a great tool to have all blogs and other sources of information in only one place.
well in that case - you may find this article useful and interesting
https://mashable.com/2007/10/03/productivity-igoogle/
Rishil,
I'm wondering - how would you go about tracking competitor pricing with iGoogle? I'm trying to figure it out and having trouble knowing where to start.
If you don't want to give you secret away I understand.
-Mike (bigtequila at gmail dot com)
Another great move by Yahoo!
However I'd have to end the statements "the results are organic" with "right now". To me this sets Yahoo! in a great position to sell more Yahoo! Sponsored Shortcut results like the Special K one.
I'd also end the statement "there's no specific attempt to drive traffic to a Yahoo! property from the results" with "for the search I did." It seems everytime I do a search (until they just changed over to the new format) on yahoo for a movie, I'm directed to a Yahoo Movie or entertainment page.
BTW: When did Yahoo add the "Quick Links" to search results?
One of our clients' traffic showed over 600% overall increase in one day for a particular search query coming from AOL. I knew he ranked for the term, but so much traffic coming from AOL (more than Google?!) that day made it look strange. Because he already ranked for it before. Why were so many people all of a sudden searching that term?
Delving a little deeper, I noticed that AOL had the query he ranked for under "hot searches." It was a small boost in traffic. lasted one day only, and converted very poorly when comparing to the usual converion rate on his site.
For Ecommerce? probably not the best idea for this. A site like the NY times that profits from high pageviews and needs comscore ratings could probably benefit if they did this on a Daily basis, several times a day...
Thanks for the great post Rand!
I wonder what the bounce rate looks like on that? I'm with you; if I clicked on that link, I'd expect highly-targeted content. Going to a search results page will just frustrate many users, I suspect. If they wanted search results, they wouldn't be using Yahoo's home page in the first place.
I like this article, and it also got me to thinking about Yahoo!'s whole Search Assist feature. There, you've got a whole slew of keywords where the PPC ads are weak. Rand's same observation can be applied to all the keywords generated by Search Assist.
I'm blogging about this, by the way...
https://searchnovice.blogspot.com/
What is different than what Yahoo announced and actually did do since May 2007? I blogged about it at SEJ. Am I missing something? Cheers!
Hey, loved this article. Because I'm a nerd, I just made an RSS feed, based on a little python script I wrote which scrapes the Yahoo home page for these search links. Updates every 10 minutes or so. https://www.smdev.org/yahoo
It's currently having trouble scraping links from the inner tabs (except for the last one), and of course I can't vouch for this working well, since it's running off my home computer. But if anyone makes a small fortune off this, I'll happily except dontations :)
excellent work!!! if you do improve it, it would be good to see!
I don't get it. They still mix paid search into their organic results, right? So all this window-dressing is just that - window dressing.
Don't they understand that search quality is what put Google over the top?
Its different courses for different horses... When I do click on Yahoo stories, they tend to be quite short - and I tend to be too lazy to search for further details - and if I do - I switch to Google automatically.
If the search results on this new strategy turn out to answer my questions / whet my appetite somewhat immediately, I would be less inclined to go to google for those particular results...
But Yahoo has a reputation as delivering poorer quality results and mixing in paid results. If they don't address that, I'm not sure how any of this stuff achieves anything. It's like painting flames on a Pinto. It's still a Pinto. The guy down the street still has a Ferrari.
I think it's a very good way to leverage existing resources and traffic. Hands up for yahoo. I wouldn't say it is 'pitiful'.
Firstly, Google became who they re because they are very good at making free referrals. The reason Yahoo, though started before Google, isn't as good is because they were so focused on keeping people in the Yahoo network.
This move seems to be a move to turn a new leaf. For what it is worth, it is more traffic for good content. Conversion is out of the question because those search queries they are linking to were probably human reviewed before they were put on the front page.
Okay, granted "pitiful" may be a bit harsh. I guess I just don't see that it's going to benefit the user in any real way. The fact that it's so obviously Yahoo! trying to "leverage resources and traffic" for their own advantage doesn't scream "user benefit" for me. I think the end result will be many dissatisfied users who think, "if I wanted to browse search results for the new Indiana Jones movie I would have searched for it, thanks." I know that's my initial reaction, and I have to think many others will react similarly.
Of course, that's just my two pennies.
There are some potential PPC wins here... if you can write convincing enough copy....
Excellent spot Rand - I see how blindsighted we can be if we get google mania... and not focus on the "other" SE's...
"I think that iGoogle, being a user-customized portal, is taking some of that traffic away from Yahoo! "
do you have any numbers to back this up....iGiggle at this assertion
Those numbers would be hard to come by. So the answer is no. However, I know about 7-8 people who have started using iGoogle recently as their main internet portal, and most of them admittedly have used Yahoo! less as a result. It's a pretty small sample, sure, but I'd have to imagine it's having some effect. Do you disagree?
IMHO - I dont think that iggogle is that widely used - out of the 300 people I come in contact with that use the web, only 2 use it - and these guys are designers, programmers, content managers, SEO's, SEM's etc...
But I might have had a completely skewed sample.
I guess I'm wrong - I don't have much of a sample group to work from. I've found iGoogle extremely useful, and I've spread the word - some of the people I work with use it all the time as well. But I guess it isn't widely used yet. . .
According to this report (of course not official) on 8/25/07
https://www.seoish.com/igoogle-is-gaining-serious-steam/
"'15 to 20 percent' of all Google homepage visits go to iGoogle instead of the traditional homepage"
Well, I'll be damned. . .I wasn't completely wrong for once.
I wonder if thats skewed by the fact that it leaves you logged on? I mean my default google is logged in - so that I can maintain my search history...