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This topic comes up fairly often - is the Yahoo Directory still worth the submission fee?
We know it gets very little traffic and drives very few leads to a web site. So probably not worth it for the ROI in direct sales. But in terms of the link value of having a nice link from the Yahoo Directory pointing to your web site?
This topic comes up a few times a year in the various SEO forums. The answer has changed through the years. In 2006 the Yahoo Directory's $299 yearly fee was well worth the money, said on expert link building. In 2008, it was beginning to become questionable and then in late 2008, Google removed the suggestion to get a link from Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project from their webmaster guidelines. In late 2009, there were rumors that the Yahoo Directory would be closed, it was but only on international properties.
So now, in 2012, is it worth having a link from the Yahoo Directory? Does it help? Would it hurt with Penguin? Those are the questions SEOs are asking.
Would it hurt with Penguin? No - I am sorry.
But is it worth the fee? I'd say only if you think you can make your $299 per year back with it from a direct sale.
I rarely ever use the Yahoo Directory to find stuff but I will this week to look for a signage company to hire for a new set of signs for my new office - outside of that, the last time I used it was ten years ago to find a signage company for the previous building I was in.
Take my poll:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jonathan Bentz
07/02/2012 12:31 pm
The only way I see a link from the directory carrying any weight is if the page ranks in the top 200 for an intended keyword target - and if you're really looking for it to "pay for itself" with referral traffic/lead gen, it better be on the first page of results, too. Certainly, this only happens in certain scenarios or niche keyword groups. Which then begs the question about whether or not you'll even "need" the link to be able to rank for the keyword, in the first place.
Dan
07/02/2012 12:45 pm
I actually just bought into it for one of my sites to see if I can get any traffic from it (or a boost in rankings, which will be pretty tough to verify.) However, I do have one client who gets a good 15-20 hits a week from the Yahoo Directory. I'll have to see if they've setup any tracking methods to see if that traffic converts at all.
Korean SEO Guy
07/03/2012 12:03 am
In Y! Korea, the directory submission was integrated with Bing webmaster tool since Nov. 17, 2011. If you are interested in Naver, 1st largest search property in Korea.... The Naver directory page was disappeared on May, this year but available directory submission. If you want your site is crawled, indexed and listed at Naver SERP with Multi-collection, the submission is essential.
WizardoftheWebsites
07/10/2012 12:44 am
I think the Yahoo Directory is still a viable source and is still worth the backlink to your website or blog. No matter how much visitor traffic you may get, the backlinks alone are worth the submission. Having to pay for your submission weeds out the bad links that you can find on other search engines as well as give more credit to your links. just my opinion though. Michael Cole
yonowillis
07/25/2012 07:24 am
Yahoo Directory has many benefits for the website. It turn out the crawling of the Google spiders to that website and to provide high authority backlinks on a regular basis. In my opinion it still worth the submission fee.
Los Angeles SEO Company
09/21/2012 06:05 pm
But is it worth the fee? no
Greg Tooke
10/12/2012 01:19 pm
If you are wondering about the importance of a Yahoo directory listing for your site's SEO, do what I did. Go to the directory and search for your keyword. Observe the results. In my case, NONE of the listings were on the 1st two pages of Google's search results for that keyword. No value to me.
holiday to phuket
10/21/2012 10:26 am
Yahoo Directory is still worth and viable source the backlink to your website.