Member Avatar for tustind

I have a website which does very solid organic traffic through Google. This is an article website and we haven't done anything to specifically target google or any other search engine.

Nevertheless, here is a breakdown of our search engine traffic from the last month:
Google - 94%
Yahoo - 3.5%
Search - 0.82%
Ask - 0.56%
AOL - 0.54%
Bing - 0.23%

A couple notes:
-We publish mostly academic articles and research papers
-We are included in Google news, which brings in a good amount of traffic

But, this still can't be purely reflective of the relative popularity of the search engines. Any ideas?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by infinique

Dani AI

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— that Google-heavy split is common for article/research sites, but it is worth ruling out a few concrete causes before assuming it simply reflects market share. The steps below are quick, practical checks that usually reveal why Google dominates for a particular site.

Quick diagnostic checklist:

  • Look at raw referrers and landing pages. In your analytics, segment by landing page and by full referrer string (server logs help). See whether traffic labeled “google / organic” is actually coming from news.google.com, scholar.google.com, reader/aggregators, or a direct bookmark that analytics misattributes.
  • Compare indexed pages. Run site:yourdomain.com on Google, Bing and Yahoo and compare index counts, then confirm in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for actual coverage and crawl errors.
  • Verify vertical inclusion. If you are in Google News or indexed by Google Scholar, those verticals send high-intent visitors to article pages. Check news sitemap, feed markup and publisher settings.
  • Check crawl/access. Confirm robots.txt, meta robots, and canonical tags aren’t accidentally discouraging other engines. Use “fetch as bot” in webmaster tools to test.
  • Inspect backlinks and referral distribution. Google’s link graph and freshness signals can favor newly published academic pieces; a few well-placed links (or institutional referrals) can amplify Google visibility.

Context and next moves: is right that your audience (students/researchers) tends to favor Google, and ’s News point is important — News/Scholar can skew the share heavily. ’s geo/language note is relevant if some engines index regional content differently. If diversification matters, submit sitemaps to Bing, use structured data, and run a few test queries in each engine to compare SERP features and CTRs. If the goal is pure traffic, focus on the verticals that already work (clean feeds, strong metadata, consistent publishing cadence).

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Member Avatar for cantthink

My first thought is that it is nothing. It's just that many people (students) use Google over other search engines. And since you have organic traffic coming it, that could be the only reason.

Have you checked your listings on all the search engines? That could be another reason. You might have more pages indexed on Google than anywhere else.

Member Avatar for joseph-wright

hmmmmm good results

wat is that site..?

Member Avatar for quicktpgo

If it is the popularity of SE that you want, I can be sure that google is the most popular one.

But you need not do SEO targeting at google for course.

Member Avatar for bbriniotis

The main reason is that Google has a great market share. Also google has many search engine versions depending the language/country. If your blog posts are in not in english and they have a geographical targeting this could also be a good reason.

Member Avatar for AirForceOne

I think the reason behind this would be more people are using Google News engine for seeking materials on articles. :)

Thanks,

Member Avatar for infinique

Yahoo and Bing is almost dead meat. There's no point in focusing on these 2 search engines that only favours keywords inside domains when deciding the keyword rankings.

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