An interesting fact about Yahoo is that the site was never really that far behind Google at any point in time.  The two powerhouse sites have always been close in terms of traffic.  In July, 197 million people visited the Yahoo with a strong second place going to Google with 192 million people visiting during the same time period.  Yahoo’s decision to appoint Marissa Mayer as the CEO has been a great one, because she has been able to grab headlines right and left for Yahoo.

If one was to review Yahoo’s traffic for 2013, the traffic is going to demonstrate Yahoo was never very far behind.  Even before Mayer came on as the chief executive, Yahoo’s traffic was holding on in the ranking.

The most important category to focus on was making sure mobile devices were paid close attention too.  Mayer made a bold decision to give $200 million dollars to the development of mobile apps and making sure every mobile user would have a friendly experience with Yahoo.

Revamping the Yahoo experience to make it even better than before.  Mayer’s first huge makeover was Yahoo Mail in December.  Right after Yahoo Mail got a makeover, next came the home page of Yahoo was also re-designed.  Improving and re-designing Yahoo’s sites make a huge difference.

Yahoo.com is going to be a very exciting website to watch over the next year with all of the amazing improvements, and the apps are going to be even better.  With Mayer on board each person following the improvements of Yahoo is going to be pleasantly surprised with her innovative spirit and her passion to make Yahoo be a huge success.

• Yahoo!’s investments in Alibaba totaled a 40% stake in the company
• Alibaba paid Yahoo! approximately $6.3 billion in cash + $800 million in preferred shares
• A one time $550 million cash payment was related to both companies’ intellectual property agreement

Yahoo! purchased the shares in Alibaba back in 2005 for $1 billion. It is still unclear how Yahoo! intends to return the profited funds, but rumors include possible buybacks or dividends. A buyback would allow investors the option of selling back part of their shares at a premium. This option would also benefit Yahoo! by boosting its stock price. Another prediction proposes that Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s new CEO, may use the cash to purchase promising startups.

While this isn’t the official comScore release, the following data shows the changes for February:

• Google: 66.4 percent (vs. 65.4 percent a year ago)
• Bing: 15.3 percent (vs. 13.6 percent a year ago)
• Yahoo: 13.8 percent (vs. 16.1 percent a year ago)
• Ask: 3 percent (vs. 3.2 percent a year ago)
• AOL: 1.5 percent (vs. 1.7 percent a year ago)

When combined, the search alliance share is at 29.1 percent, essentially continuing the plateau it has been in for many months; however, the decline in Yahoo!’s numbers over the past year is significant.

I am a big fan of Gmail, however few weeks ago I logged in to my old Yahoo and Hotmail email account. The experience was horrible! They were working incredible slow, the interface seemed to be so not user friendly.

It looks like, live messaging is a great way for communication mainly for young and active people looking for a quick respond from friends. I believe that for businesses e-mails are still the best way of communication. Live messaging in many cases would overwhelm busy business people. A bad condition of Yahoo and Hotmail seems to be a result of a competition – Gmail.

While Alexa is known as a indicator of worldwide website popularity, we recommend to read our post why Alexa Ranking is useless.

Under that deal between those two companies, Microsoft provides the back-end crawling, listing, and ranking technologies that generate search results, while Yahoo is responsible for presenting those results on search pages.

So, for SEO experts there is no any news, Google is still a leader with 84.96% and it is the main search engine which can bring traffic to the website.

Sources: marketshare.hitslink.com