Are Yahoo Traffic Quality Scores Nonsensical?
July 18, 2010 by adminst
Filed under Affiliate Programs, Domain Name PPC, Domains & Websites, Featured Articles, Software & Programs, Traffic & Revenue, Website & Domain Issues
Yahoo! is a major advertising feed provider for a few well known domain name parking firms. Domains which are not active websites are usually parked so the domain-name owner gets an opportunity to earn revenue from pay-per-click ads which appear on the pages which are parked.
One of the larger and best domain parking firms is Parked.com, who reports by way of a graphical line chart viewable on the clients dashboard page showing their web-page visitor traffic quality scoring.
Even since the Yahoo feed traffic scores were openly disclosed we have always thought the scores made little sense and seemed nonsensical since the scores fluctuate a lot even though the parked domains and their visitor traffic stays basically the same.
In the past (again with about the same quality traffic) our score has ranged from a very low 1 and all the way up to a consistent 9 or 10, with 10 being the highest possible score, and has held as a 9 or 10 for long time periods. Here is our most recent quality score report according to Yahoo! which covers the last nine quality score iterations:
2.5 – 3.0 – 0 – 0 – 6.0 – 1.0 – 1.0 – 5.5 – 7.0
In our opinion, it appears to be virtually impossible for such wild fluctuations to take place. In fact, the visitor quality scores almost appear like random numbers, keeping in mind the parked domains and their combined traffic are basically the same for the entire reporting period. What do you think?
As one more indication the Yahoo! Traffic quality scoring system is allegedly more or less nonsensical we noticed our TQ score for the very next time period dropped a lot, from 7.0 down to 4.5 in just a week.
In itself that may not seem significant (especially in view of past wild fluctuations) but when you consider our traffic stats and revenue were actually comparatively better vs past time periods, that makes the quick decline to 4.5 even stranger.
In fact, for the period after the 7.0 TQ we had several of the best traffic and stats days of the year! More evidence the Yahoo TQ scores make little if any sesne.
The Yahoo traffic quality scoring is still acting crazy with nonsensical numbers. Even though the websites and traffic had basically the same traffic and quality during the latest time frame our traffic quality scoring makes little sense. Look at the chart: