Crazy Yahoo Traffic - 1800 Visitors In One Hour
ron
SERLists.com
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):
Weirder yet, Yahoo seems to be following Google with [secure search] - So this is literally all Yahoo traffic - not even 1 Google visitor:
And here's another website that I dedicated to just Bing and Yahoo traffic from the last two weeks:
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
Comments
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.
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.
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
It just keeps going up:
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.
The numbers keep going up - about 100 visitors every 10 minutes!
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:
Bing and Yahoo always convert better than Google. That % is typical of Bing visitors. Google averages about 2%, fyi.
@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:
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:
I was really hoping that somebody else - out of all the folks here - would see something like this. Oh well.
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.
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:
Thank you Yahoo!
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.
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:
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.
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:
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...
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.
@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.