SEOs should take note that for the eighth month in a row, yahoo search is trending downward. Yahoo has seen a yearly gain, but that is primarily driven by Bing serving their results. Analysts note that Yahoo’s increase is lagging a year behind Bing. Google saw a .1% increase in traffic which is positive, but not quite the increases they had long grown accustomed to. Hitwise, on the other hand, tells a different story where Google loses ground and Yahoo is the gain winner. While this may be confusing, there are a few things we do know.
Yahoo is sliding fast. If it weren’t for Bing serving their search, yahoo would be gone. Most of the Yahoo search team was fired recently and there are no plans to replace them. Yahoo is essentially waving a white flag of surrender and hoping to reinvent to a paid niche search service. Bing is moving forward with social search driving their reinvigorated growth. There is no valid reason to believe Bing won’t gain a larger share of the search market.
Google is at worst holding steady. Google is too big to fail in a month, quarter or even a couple years. Google users are however expressing more frustration with the search portion of the company and SEOs are none too thrilled with the constant algorithm changes. What it all means for SEOs is that Google is still king, and while Bing is queen, the queen is wielding more power. Yahoo on the other hand went from king, to queen to joker in a decade. Yahoo is not a search engine to focus on any longer.
