Pinterest Now Sending More Traffic Than Yahoo Search, Shareaholic Says

Yahoo’s slide continues with the news today that Pinterest is now sending more traffic to publishers than organic Yahoo search results.

That’s according to Shareaholic, a provider of social sharing buttons and widgets with more than 200,000 publishers using its tools.

In a blog post today, Shareaholic says Pinterest was the fourth biggest traffic source in August among its publishers — beating out Yahoo organic search, which fell to fifth. Overall, Google search was the top traffic source, followed by direct traffic and then Facebook in third. (See far right column below.) Pinterest also passed Bing as a traffic source back in June (also noted below in red).

Note that Google, Yahoo and Bing referrals are all down since the start of the year across Shareaholic’s network. Facebook is even down a percentage point, too. Direct traffic, Pinterest and Google referral traffic (presumably Google+ is the largest portion of that, although iGoogle would probably be included there) are all up for the year.

Here’s a closer look from Shareaholic’s post, showing Pinterest compared to Yahoo, Bing and Twitter.

The caveat on this data is that it’s specific to the 200,000 or so websites that are using Shareaholic’s sharing widgets. The makeup of those sites will have a big impact on what kind of traffic they get and where it comes from. If some of the sites aren’t optimized well for natural search, or were hit by various Google (or Bing) algorithm changes, natural search traffic would decline as it has. Likewise, if many of the sites are social-friendly — particularly with visuals that play well on Pinterest — that would also impact the data.

Nonetheless, though it’s a limited sample of websites, it’s still interesting to see where they’re getting traffic.

ComScore recently pegged Yahoo’s U.S. search market share at 13 percent — an all-time low — and says Yahoo recently had a run of 10 consecutive months of declining market share. The August search numbers should be out in the next week or so.