A few weeks ago I gave in and switched to Yahoo’s new home page. The first thing I noticed was that the directory is absent from the new version of Yahoo.com (the new version seems to be the default page now, spider simulators I checked are indicating so). One question immediately popped into my mind: Without the extremely powerful link from Yahoo’s homepage, will people still pay $299/year to be listed in http://dir.yahoo.com?

Well, it looks like Yahoo may have already compensated for the loss in link-power, to some extent. A link to the directory was recently added to Altavista.com, which is owned by Yahoo. Archive.org’s last cache of Altavista.com shows no link to dir.yahoo.com, as of 4/1/05. I can’t say for sure, but would bet the link was added to Altavista when Yahoo decided to nix the directory from their home page.

Altavista is undoubtedly a strong site, with a Google Pagerank of 9, the same as Yahoo.com. However, Yahoo’s index has 28,800,000 inbound links compared to Altavista’s 2,230,000 (according to Yahoo).

Will I still submit sites to dir.yahoo.com? Definitely, for now. It’s difficult to find links as relevant and high-quality as those you can get from Yahoo’s dir. But damn, it sure was nice getting backlinks that are 2 clicks away from Yahoo.com =( I suppose real estate on their homepage has become too valuable to waste a directory, even if it was once their claim to fame.

Regarding Yahoo’s motivations for this change - If they did add the link to their directory from Altavista.com to compensate for the upcoming change, the implications are intriguing. Did they add the link for the convenience of Altavista users? Or was the purpose to maintain the link popularity of dir.yahoo.com? That’s pure speculation, and a topic for another post.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 9:56 pm and is filed under SEO, Internet Marketing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.