Like many people of my generation, my very first e-mail address was through Yahoo! Also, like many people of my generation, I haven’t used Yahoo! in years. It mostly functions as a relic of the dot-com bubble now, much like MySpace. But, while you can still access MySpace in the same way you can still access Yahoo!, does that mean you should make an account? If you are wondering if your business should devote time and energy on Yahoo!, Creekmore Marketing has created a quick guide to inform you about what it still has to offer you.

History

Like Google, Yahoo! came out of Stanford University in the 1990’s. It was created by Jerry Yang and David Filo and named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” It was revolutionary for the time in that it organized search results into a hierarchy as opposed to an index, a move that later search engines would owe to “Jerry and David’s Guide.” Several months after the Guide was created, it was renamed Yahoo! The name Yahoo had actually already been trademarked by several different endeavors up to that point, which necessitated the exclamation point at the end of Yahoo!’s name. Through the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Yahoo! saw massive growth, as many such companies did, through the dot-com bubble, even earning the honor of being the most expensive stock ever sold in Japan in 2000. However, when the dot-com bubble burst, Yahoo!’s value crashed and never fully recovered. Various companies attempted to acquire it, but only in 2009 was it officially bought out by Microsoft. While Yahoo! is still running, it is slated to be fully replaced by Bing by 2019.

Percentage of Overall Search Volume

While Yahoo! may be essentially defunct at this point in time, it does still receive a surprising amount of search engine traffic. While it does still fall behind, it stays roughly equivalent with Bing, earning 11% of the total search queries for 2015 while Bing earned closer to 20%. While that gap may sound large, that amounts to Bing receiving 3,676 million queries in December of 2015, while Yahoo! received 2,201 million queries. While this is vastly less than what Google receives, it is still a sizable number of queries, and places it above other search engines that were created around the same time, such as Ask and AOL.

Reviews

Like other search engines, Yahoo! does not give its users an avenue to review businesses directly. While you can still claim your business’s listing on Yahoo!, the reviews that populate will be scraped from other review gathering services, such as Yelp.

Major Algorithm Changes

Because Yahoo! is so comparatively outdated, little is known about recent changes to their search algorithm. The most recent news that broke regarding it was that Yahoo! actually has an algorithm specifically dedicated to those using it to search on mobile. As for what this entails, the CEO of Yahoo! reportedly claimed that Yahoo!’s mobile search algorithm “provides a richer, more action-oriented set of experiences.” If you read our guide on Bing, this sounds similar to their goal of being a search engine centered around spurring consumer action. Ultimately, though, don’t expect many Yahoo! algorithm changes moving forward. After all, its expiration date is set for 2019 when it will be fully replaced by Bing.

Its Importance for Small Business SEO

I’ll start off by saying this: when was the last time you used Yahoo!? For many of us, it’s been years, and while Yahoo! does get a remarkable number of search queries every month, that has more to do with the sheer volume of people using the internet at any given time than it does with Yahoo!’s popularity. Yahoo! is soon to go the way of the dodo, and so dedicating a lot of time to it when it comes to growing your business will be time you can’t spend on other, more worthwhile search engines, like Google, Bing, or Apple. That doesn’t mean that you should 100% ignore it. Many services, like Yext, can claim your business on multiple, smaller platforms, such as Yahoo!, in one fell swoop, so if given the opportunity to do that in a way that won’t take up much of your time, it is a great option. For as long as it continues to exist, Yahoo! is still another patch in the quilt of SEO, but it’s a smaller, older one, and one that probably needs replacing.

Has this helped inform you more about how your business should use Yahoo!? If it has, or if you still have more questions, contact Creekmore Marketing to figure out more ways to grow your business online.