HOW is yahoo still beating google in terms of traffic rank?

I don’t remember when I’ve last visited http://yahoo.com, but then again, I very rarely visit http://google.com either – I do use the google search in Safari and that will load either google.ie or google.dk (depending on how I’ve messed up my settings).

#2 in the U.S.

Yahoo runs a lot of sites, like Flickr, HotJobs, Answers, etc. and maybe it’s the combined total of all their properties (that is, anything that resides on the “yahoo.com” domain). So… not just search.

i know http://google.com (the page itself) is used as just a search engine while yahoo offers other things such as news and entertainment on the page itself. but isn’t the traffic rank calculated for all of google domains? so the rank should also be counted gmail, google news, google maps etc….is that right?

They do not. Google services have many more individual visitors per month than Yahoo!.

The Alexa rankings are widely known to be flawed and heavily based on algorithmic guesswork. For example, my personal portfolio site does not get 10,000 visitors per month, which is what Alexa seems to think. That would be amazing.

@ rob – it seems we were thinking along the same lines :)

@ richardhenry – ah! i did not know that. maybe that’s it then.

To go the other way, a project I was involved with last year recieved well in excess of a million individual visitors in it’s launch week. According to Alexa, it was only 300,000. Talk about off.

Ahh, I think I found Alexa’s operations manual: How to Lie with Statistics

Alexa is wrong. It’s very inaccurate. In fact, I suppose it’s near impossible to come even close to accuracy in statistics like this.

I guess I will not be going back to that site anymore.

The Alexa ranking for a particular website is calculated by the number of sites linking to it (determining it’s ‘importance’), adding importance to an individual link if the linking site is important (if you get what I mean). Although this is pretty good for search engine ranking, it is very inaccurate when you try and guess user statistics.

Alexa has no way to account for people who use Google as their homepage, as their browser search bar, or type “google.com” into their address bar, and wrongly believes that because perhaps more people link to Yahoo! (probably true, since they have their own news section) then surely it must have more visitors.

In order for a true central resource for visitor statistics to exist, all websites would have to release their traffic information, and nobody likes surrendering information unless absolutely necessary.

I never visit yahoo. I use Google all the time, though.

@ richard – i understand what you mean. it makes sense now. thanks for taking the time to explain it to me!

I use the Yahoo weather site daily.