Skip to content

Crazy Yahoo Traffic - 1800 Visitors In One Hour

ronron SERLists.com
edited February 2014 in Other / Off Topic

Hey guys,

I was wondering if any of you have seen any crazy insane numbers with Yahoo traffic. I was doing some experimenting with GSA-SER, and only targeting Yahoo/Bing, and this is what happened.

All within one hour, on two different websites. This is this morning - already made over $600 in commissions in about 90 minutes (Website 1 averages 150 Bing/Yahoo visitors per day):

image

image

Weirder yet, Yahoo seems to be following Google with [secure search] - So this is literally all Yahoo traffic - not even 1 Google visitor:


image


image

And here's another website that I dedicated to just Bing and Yahoo traffic from the last two weeks:

image

This is the craziest stuff I have ever seen. I know everybody pooh-poohs Bing and Yahoo, but I have found Bing/Yahoo to be a very 'reliable' method of making money. Traffic converts well.

Back to what I am trying to find out:

1) Are people starting to see [secure search] results from Bing/Yahoo? It sleighs me because I cannot see what the search term is.

2) Is anyone seeing massive traffic spikes with Bing/Yahoo?


Thanks,

Ron


«1

Comments

  • That is strange. I have never seen Yahoo encrypt search results.

    What are you doing to rank in bing/yahoo? Just ticking those search engines in SER and letting it run?
    How long did it take you to rank there?
    From my experience those search engines are extremely slow at noticing any seo.
  • ronron SERLists.com
    edited February 2014

    I can't give away the secret sauce on exactly what I am doing. I was always ranking in Yahoo and Google, and then got penalized. I didn't move all penalized websites to new websites. I left a few so I could experiment with Bing/Yahoo.

    I think it is critical to understand Bing/Yahoo given what is happening with Google.

  • edited February 2014
    I had a site I was earning great for a very good traffic kw in google, several hundred k nearly 2 years ago (those were the days!) then it got slammed havent been able to touch google agian now with that but it still holds steady in yahoo for some longer tails of 4-5k its number one and two for a couple with some decent traffic to earn some pocket money. Id love to be able to concentrate on yahoo and bing if they were profitable evne if it was a little more work if they turned out to be more steady. But isnt it just a case of rnak for google and yahoo and bing will follow? I heard that the main problem with them over google is they take way longer to rank like more than a year? Ive never evne looked at rnakings in the past for them except for that one site but form my traffic is see not much comes from them when i have had kws rnaking,
  • Once the G honeymoon is over I have left sites that were still collecting Y/B traffic. I can't say I have ever seen anything like those traffic spikes However once it is over with G I stop working on them. From my limited tracking I can't say I see [secure search] coming from Y either.

    For these sites did you keep building links or working on them in other ways after G gave up on them? You must be doing something interesting.

    Maybe it is time for me to start comparing G and Y serps :)
  • ronron SERLists.com

    It just keeps going up:


    image

    I know people always say there is no traffic on Bing/Yahoo. It is all bunk. It depends on what you are targeting.

    But I still can't explain it. It is almost as if someone was buying traffic and sending it to my account. But I am not sure how the referral would show up if they did that. Maybe as a direct visitor. No idea.

  • edited February 2014
    Across hundreds of domains over the years I've never seen any decent traffic from either Yahoo/Bing from many many many different niches - travel/electronics/local/services are just some I'm in - it's always less than 1% of the total amount of organic traffic.

    I wonder what's gone on. It's almost like your site/link is on Yahoo's homepage or something. Is it deskptop or mobile? Maybe if it's mobile traffic it's something to do with Windows Phones using Bing automatically, or something like that. Really interested 
    8-X
  • Bing/Yahoo will be starting to encrypt search results, I just "googled it" ;)
  • ronron SERLists.com

    The numbers keep going up - about 100 visitors every 10 minutes!

    image

    So two websites are affected. I'm not going to get into exactly how much I have made in the last three hours, but here is a snapshot of just one product's conversion - all the others are just as big:


    image

    Bing and Yahoo always convert better than Google. That % is typical of Bing visitors. Google averages about 2%, fyi.

  • edited February 2014
    Bing traffic always convert . If people are dumb enough to search via bing (i.e default IE & on win phones) , they are dumb enough to buy anything on internet .
    PS I put my parents in the above category . I managed to stop my mom on the last moment from buying some dish soap on a shady website (she uses bing & IE) . 

    Enjoy &keep banking . 
  • Trevor_BanduraTrevor_Bandura 267,647 NEW GSA SER Verified List
    edited February 2014
    Are you buying traffic with PPC?

    CPA earnings or an actual product like from Clickbank?
  • @ron what are you using to track visits
  • ronron SERLists.com

    @DonCorleone - That's hysterical!

    @Trevor_Bandura - No, that is the entire point. I don't know how Yahoo can possibly send that much traffic *organically*. These all came from search, with over 90% coming from [secure search].

    @rodol - I use Clicky. Superior to GWMT. The bounce rate is a *real* bounce rate. The service pings your website every 10 seconds to see what the visitor is doing.

    Anyway, it keeps getting bigger:image

    Of course I'm smiling. What isn't cool is when you don't exactly know what is going on.

    @Judderman - I thought the theory of Yahoo front page was a great idea. But it's not that. These are still searches, just mainly secure (about 85%). Your theory about mobile was also a great idea. It turns out 98% is from desktop:

    image

    I was really hoping that somebody else - out of all the folks here - would see something like this. Oh well.








  • I'm currently ranking on #4 spot on yahoo and bing for a keyword which have 40k monthly searches according to Google keyword tool, unfortunately just few visits a day
  • ronron SERLists.com
    edited February 2014

    That is precisely the point. It always seems that Yahoo overestimates their traffic, because I have a ton of #1 rankings just to get to 200-300 visitors per day.

    I can go into MSN Adcenter, and see all the Bing volumes. Quite honestly I am not sure, but I think their results that they list are all broad match. But nothing correlates to this. Plus, I can't see the search term.

  • Someone DDoS you with real leads that convert  :))
  • s4nt0ss4nt0s Houston, Texas
    Wow that is interesting seeing the fluctuations in traffic like that. Good thing you're smart enough to make websites that actually convert ;)

    Beer's on @ron? haha j/k

    Hope the sales keep coming in for you. You deserve it. 

    Keep us updated, I'd like to see how this unfolds. 
  • Hmmm that's weird then and equally awesome! Looking at your previous spikes of traffic, and not knowing the industry/niche you're in, then could it be something to do with news? Anything in the news lately and was on the 17th and 25th January? 

    Anyway, whatever it is, it's amazing and I could only hope for numbers like that ;) I remember a few years ago getting a few weird spikes with Adsense and couldn't place where it came from. Happened on 2-3 separate days, about 4-5 days apart and never came back. Was exciting at the time, hope you get some longevity out of it.
  • ronron SERLists.com
    edited February 2014

    Crazy stuff. The last two times were one day events - but only affected one website. Now it is two websites, and the newest addition is the big one today. The other site that hit 1400/day twice looks like it is going to do the same today. The big one is something like 100 visitors every 10 minutes:image

    Thank you Yahoo!


  • edited February 2014
    Are you able to reproduce it?  If so,  Seems you found yourself a nice money maker there. :)   That is interesting though.  

    I've had sites where before I even finished making the site were already generating sales.   I've also had sites where someone for some reason was sending their PPC traffic to my site.  Prolly on Accident either way it was really weird.

    Hopefully it continues for you.  :)
  • ronron SERLists.com
    edited February 2014

    It's reproducing on its own, lol. It started on one website and spread to another. I know it is hard to see, but that top site averages 150/day. Small potatoes. So why would I not only have such large searches, but a crazy high # of *direct* visitors - ones who typed the website name in the browser:image

    So almost 1000 people typed the website in their browser????? A lot more questions than answers.

    One site (not one of the above) experienced exactly what you said about PPC - somebody used my website name in the ppc ad, and when you clicked on it, it all went to my site. This went on for two months. The guy must have been short a pair of chromosomes or something. But those all came in under the "Link" section. So PPC is a link, and the referring source always shows the website with the ad. So this definitely cannot be PPC.

    I know this will end today. I could have posted this on two other occasions, right? But I thought it was a fluke. Now it happened on two websites. So something is going on.

     

  • To Me it sounds like maybe something Judderman had said.  Maybe your site got listed in a news story or something similar that could be the only thing that I would think of that would generate that much direct traffic along with a huge flux of searches. 


  • ronron SERLists.com

    For sure it is wacko. I investigated every angle, yahoo news, searching my website names - nothing. Here's where it ended the day at midnight - it also shows clicks to affiliate offers:

    image

    The click thru rate was about average. Around 33% on the big one, and about 28% for the second one. All together, there was over 2400 clicks to affiliate offers. It was my best single day moneywise in 16 years of SEO and webmastering. So yeah, I basically got nothing done today, lol.

    Every single visitor was from Yahoo/Bing. Not one out of the 7500 unique visitors came from Google.

    This was so unusual I wanted to document it. We always see case studies and cool stuff like that. But this is very different.

    And I did get a few PM's and emails on this - I only used GSA-SER on these accounts.

    Signing out...

  • :) almost like reading reportage from olypmic games and you got the gold.
  • @ron Yahoo has a habit of linking to search results as a kind of 'contextual ad' - they know banner clicks are worth a lot less than high CPC clicks on their search engine, so they try to draw visitors from their content portals into search to make more money off them.

    Some advertisers find this controversial as in search you are bidding for 'intent' vs browsers on a content network and Yahoo fudge the two together.

    Is it possible you are ranking for a keyword they've chosen to link to in their on page ads?

    Also the direct visitors are also likely search, just from visitors with higher privacy settings.
  • Is it an EMD/PMD?
  • ronron SERLists.com

    @namdas - I never heard of that. If you see anything written on that. I would like to read it. That idea made the most sense of all. The reason I say that is my listings stand out relative to the other top 5 listings.

    I cannot know what term [secure search] was used for the traffic, but it all was to the home page for both websites. For both websites, right after [secure search], the term with the second highest volume happened to be the exact same term on both websites. And that term was in the 100's for traffic whereas the typical daily average is 5 visitors per day. That tells me that this whole thing revolves around that term for both websites.

    @JudderMan - It was a PPMD (new terms created on the fly, lol). By that I mean one word was the same, and a second one was morphed, and their third word didn't match. So I rank for that term, but not a great match.

  • I had this happen a couple of times and found out I was being shared on someones list.  Must have been a positive review as I had loads of sales.  Always nice when it happens, can't offer any additional insight though...  :D
  • Hey @ron I don't have an article but here's a picture showing a link from the UK yahoo homepage to the search 'airport parking': http://postimg.org/image/6o0yr4g7d/ They also link to 'last minute flights', 'spa breaks' etc. Though the weather is pretty filthy I doubt those searches are trending in quite the same way a celebrity name would.
  • Interesting read! 

    What is weird to me is that same exact thing happened to his 2 sites not only 1. Are they in same niche targeting same keywords or 2 different unrelated niche? It would be weird that you targeting two different niche and they both ended up on Yahoo homepage. 
  • ronron SERLists.com
    Both are in the exact same niche, and both are ranking for the exact same keyword - which I know for sure is the reason for all of this. That's why I think @namdas is on to something.

    Ultimately 80% came through secure search, 15% thru typing the URL in the browser, and 5% the actual search term was revealed. So 100% organic listings, absolutely no PPC.
Sign In or Register to comment.