The Negative Effect Of A Yahoo Directory Listing
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December 12th, 2006 
Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation 
6 Comments Do you have a Yahoo directory listing? Do you know this could have a negative effect on your organic SERPS Click through Rate? Over the past year, we have been measuring and analyzing the traffic of our listing with Yahoo for our web design company. Using the search term “Web Design Ireland” in Yahoo, RedFly Studios LTD has had a relatively steady position between 1 and 3 in the Yahoo! SERPS. A top three ranking, amazing! But all is not as wonderful as it seems…
Google suggests specifically in their webmaster guidelines:
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Anything that can help your Search Engine Optimisation efforts straight from the mouth of Google must be worth the $299 listing fee right? Maybe for Google, but what about Yahoo? Yahoo! only allows you to submit a site to their directory using the sites official business name. Yahoo also lists your site in their normal SERPS using this title. In this example, that is “RedFlyStudios”.
Now, all anchor text power aside (Yahoo uses redirects anyway), we have made a strange observation. Once our listing was approved in the Yahoo directory, all searches that return RedFly Studios in the results now show a title of just “RedFlyStudios”. Also, since that listing, our traffic from Yahoo organic search has dropped by over 40%. Why would that happen? Other sites returning for the search “Web Design Ireland” all show great descriptive titles. What would you click first? A title describing exactly what you are searching for or a company name you may never have heard of? I know what I would click and they are not even paying Yahoo!
We can only assume that if all other search engines are continually delivering equal or greater levels of traffic for the same search results that the relative same ratio of searches is being made on Yahoo.This would indicate that as a result of our non descriptive title and dishing out $299 for a directory listing, our CTR has actually decreased.
So I ask you, what is the value of ranking high in search results if people are not actually clicking through to your website? Is sacrificing traffic from one search engine worth a non-confirmed boost in others?
***UPDATE***
Yahoo have recently announced support for the <meta name=”Slurp” content=”NOYDIR” /> meta tag allowing webmasters to tell Yahoo to use the site description rather than the directory description. Just goes to show, if we make enough noise, the big boys listen.
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January 25th, 2007 at 3:01 am
I fight this every day – but Tim Mather indicated that Yahoo was deeveloping a tag that would let you “disallow” use of the Yahoo Directory directory descirption/info in your SERP…similar to Google’s “NoODP” SeRoundtable.com announced this back in October – and we havent seen it yet…but that’s how Yahoo works.
You can read more here:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006526.html
Great Blog – sorry this comment is on an older post – but thought the information useful – though you probably already know.
Regards,
Carrie
February 14th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Hi Dave – great stuff you’re publishing here!
I just put the noodp meta tag in place on our site. An editor, took it upon themselves (I presume cos it’s so far from what and where we submitted) to list us with our company name misspelt and a vary inaccurate description!
There has been lots of calls for Yahoo to do something similar for a while now. They’ll have to get around to it soon – with Google granting the accurate backlinks wish, the pressure is on yahoo!
February 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Unfortunately it’s true. Yahoo list can have a negative effect this way. You can throw in some words besides you official name to your title however these often get edited like your description (even if it’s all proper English) and you’re left with a title without your keywords. And there is no way to complain about it. I heard some people complained or asked for a refund, they never got a reply.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Sorry for such a late comment but I never knew about the Yahoo! work around for this problem until I came across this post just now. The web is just so big I guess sometimes you just miss stuff!
Anyways, looks like I will be paying for a Yahoo! Directory Listing now! Great content here… it’s a definite bookmark!
July 9th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Sounds pretty screwy, but I’m glad it eventually worked out for you! I don’t think I’ll have the income to try for 299 dollar link, but I believe they still offer free links to some categories.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Is it worth spending $300 for that? A website I used to work on is listed on !Y, and gets whopping %0.03 of its traffic from !Y directory.
Do people still do it just for the sake of the Page Rank?