The Demise of Yahoo!
A long time ago, Yahoo! was a major player in search engines, transforming itself from what was essentially a massive directory of the web into a full search engine as we would recognise now. Yahoo! had many successes, such as its 1,000,000th hit in 1994, two years before it’s rival Google even began.
For over 15 years, Yahoo! has dabbled in video, social networks, email and other services such as live chat. Unfortunately for Yahoo!, all of these services seem to have been superseded by other websites (Gmail, Skype, Facebook). So many ventures by Yahoo! have been quietly killed off such as Geocities, Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! 360.
So where did Yahoo! go wrong?
Usability – The Yahoo! homepage is a famous example of a ‘bad’ homepage. With information overload and a messy design, usability experts have always criticised Yahoo!. In comparison, Google have always kept their homepage fast and simple, leaving users in no doubt about what they need to do when they land on the page.
Spam – Search results have been easy to spam on Yahoo! Back in 2009, we noticed a porn result in the top 10 results for the keyword “make money”. Not only that, but Yahoo! have been widely criticised for adult results appearing when the SafeSearch feature was enabled.
Quality of results - The quality of the results are less popular than Google. Users often find that results seem slower to appear and have less advanced features such as ‘shopping’ or ‘news’.
Management – CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz was fired at the start of September 2011 as no visible improvements had been made in almost 2 years. Bartz slashed budgets, cut staff numbers but reports of demoralised workers and boards of directors taking a long time to make decisions was cited as the reason for her removal by many SEO websites.
Because of the above problems, SEO companies don’t tend to optimise websites for Yahoo! as its ranking algorithms don’t even compete with Google, who have enjoyed a 90% market share in the UK. Can Yahoo! find its way back in to the hearts of UK internet users? What do you think Yahoo! can do to win back market share from Google? Comment below and tell us what you think!
To find out how SEO can help transform your online business, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1765.
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