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I wonder if Yahoo's new look will help increase visitors to the site and make it grow. What do you think?
http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/yahoo-homepage-makeover/

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Short expert take: a homepage redesign can generate attention, but sustained audience growth depends on product quality, search visibility, performance, and retention—not on visuals alone. Building on the perspectives in this thread from and , here are practical, actionable things to do and watch so a redesign helps instead of hurts.

Metrics to watch (immediate → 12 weeks):

  • Traffic by channel (organic, direct, referral, paid, social) — look for sudden organic drops.
  • Branded search volume and SERP click-through rate — homepage titles/meta changes can move these.
  • Returning visitor rate and cohort retention — short-term spikes are useless if users don’t come back.
  • Engagement and conversion (pages/session, time on site, signups, ad RPM) by cohort.
  • Performance: Core Web Vitals, mobile load time, and time-to-interactive.
  • Crawl/indexing errors and 404/500 spikes from server logs or webmaster tools.

Pre-launch and launch checklist:

  • Preserve URLs and canonical tags; if URLs change, deploy 301 redirects and verify them.
  • Keep or carefully update title/meta and structured data; submit an updated sitemap.
  • Instrument the homepage: events for modules, clicks, and shares so you can A/B test placements.
  • Smoke-test across devices, CDNs, and with live traffic; monitor error logs and bot activity.
  • Roll out gradually with feature flags or A/B experiments so you can rollback quickly.

Expect a short-term publicity bump. Real, lasting gains require follow-up: iterate on search relevance, personalization, retention funnels, and load speed. If traffic dips, prioritize redirects, index coverage, and performance fixes before making content changes.

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Member Avatar for MktgRob

I wonder if Yahoo's new look will help increase visitors to the site and make it grow. What do you think?
http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/yahoo-homepage-makeover/

I like it. It looks a little slicker and cleaner and the fact that they have some social media links. To be honest, while Bing has a more eye-catching home page I think that Yahoo has actually done a better job with their look. If they can add some technological improvements that Google has not they could make a bigger dent in Google's armor than Bing.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

These Yahoo changes remind me of another internet company that made similar changes and lost major market share throughout the years: AOL.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

These Yahoo changes remind me of another internet company that made similar changes and lost major market share throughout the years: AOL.

I think what hurt AOL more was that initially they were THE search engine but when MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista and all of the other first generation SE's popped up that were purely about searching (where AOL was more of an on-line mall with search capabilities), the AOL model became trite. I also think the AOL powers that be were so certain of their position on the top that they sat on their laurels in terms of keeping up with the tech advances of the competition.

I do not see Yahoo slipping into the void that AOL did because they know they need to keep the business world happy by making their search work more along the lines of what google offers. It also didn't help that AOL developed a reputation for cyber-stalking and murky behavior similar to the reputation Craigslist has picked up due to their recent problems.

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