I’ve been pouring over web stats for a half dozen clients looking for traffic from MSN and it is missing in action. Even though these sites rank well for targeted terms for my clients – MSN is not delivering the traffic at all.

This has always been an issue for SEO’s and their clients and we are puzzling this one over, looking for results from those top rankings at both Yahoo and MSN as they seem to retain the searchers no matter how well we rank the sites!

Yahoo has dropped dramatically, with referred traffic that used to amount to over 5% of the visitors to client sites, it has dropped as low as 1.5% of total referred traffic from search engines. After a recent increase in referred traffic from Yahoo search, we were hopeful it would stay high, but it wasn’t to be. Rankings haven’t declined, just the referred traffic!

Google has gone up in referrals from foreign countries, including foreign language sites. We used to see tiny amounts of traffic trickle in from non-English language countries, but Google Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico and a dozen other country specific Googles have combined to send more non-English referred traffic than the total coming from (English) Yahoo Search!

The search world is getting very odd when great rankings at Yahoo and MSN don’t equal referred traffic. This has always been the case to a degree, but is getting extreme and very disturbing. Google has always sent more traffic, with as much as 85% of referred search traffic coming from English Speaking Google variants in US, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, and UK sending more traffic than the US Yahoo or MSN.

What is the value of top rankings in MSN and Yahoo if those top positions don’t bring traffic?

Mike Banks Valentine
Ethical Search Engine Optimization Specialist
http://www.seoptimism.com/