As expected, say goodbye to a little more keyword data. But this time Yahoo! is making the switch to https. While there has been chatter about Bing providing the https option, Yahoo has made a significant move. Currently, if you go to yahoo.com it will throw you into https land. If you then do a search from yahoo.com, it will send you to https://search.yahoo.com.

However, if you go directly to search.yahoo.com, you’re in an https-free zone (for now), though they ask you to try the “full” Yahoo! experience at the core domain.

This was originally noticed after seeing Yahoo traffic decline by approximately 50% and a subsequent spike in direct traffic. It appears Yahoo! may have started testing the switch earlier but it became very clear around January 11th that they had made a partial switch:

Organic Yahoo! Traffic:

Direct Traffic: