Is Yahoo Search As Effective?

Organic search engine listings, to some, are the equivalent of life-blood of many sites. With Google and Yahoo driving the search engine industry, gaining respectable organic listings within is considered to be golden. In fact, Michael_T has this story to tell about Yahoo's impact on his search engine traffic: "I've been paying my Yahoo bills since 1999 / 2000. I'm in two directories and I also pay to sponsor two sites. The latter costs $100/ mo each. I get virtually no search traffic from Yahoo, where as Google sends me 12,000 per week. I do get visitors from the Yahoo directory listing. They do buy, so the ROI is OK. I used to get a lot of Yahoo search traffic. I think that was all Google based. Now I get almost nothing from Yahoo search. I think they have serious management problems over there. I've called Yahoo 4-5 times to run some paid adverts and the guy has not returned my calls." These facts may contribute to some questions regarding the effectiveness of the Yahoo search engine. Could the problem lie in the idea that Yahoo values Site Match listings over organic listings? Some posters around the search engine forums think so. This is an easy conclusion to reach being that Yahoo and Yahoo-owned search engines are the only ones currently using paid inclusion. However, when you consider Michael's post, even sites that he has paid listings for aren't performing well. Like Rustybrick, he receives most of his search engine traffic from Google. If you peruse the forums, you find that there are many topics discussing the lack of traffic coming from and the difficulty of maintaining consistent rankings in Yahoo. The speculation for the inconsistencies centers on Yahoo's spider Slurp. That and the fact that Yahoo no longer uses Google search results. The main complaint about Slurp is that it doesn't seem to crawl the web nearly as frequently as Google's. A few posts from WebmasterWorld would seem to support this theory. latest search news.