A cynical look at Pay Per Click (PPC)
Yahoo rant.
Run a search for ‘Directory’ on Yahoo UK. What kind of results are these? Lycos top, Wiki twice, no sign of Dmoz or their own Yahoo directory, UK or .com on the first page. If the algo can’t do it, surely you need a little manual intervention Yahoo?
In fact, even a search for ‘Yahoo directory‘ does not bring back their actual directory at the top.
If ever a handjob was needed…
In the early days of the web, yahoo was the yahoo directory. Then they started adding new services like Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Music and all that.
Around 1999 or so they started to neglect the directory — it got nearly impossible to get things added to the directory unless you paid them a few hundred bucks.
I was pretty lucky and had gotten quite a few pages in the directory back when it was easy. Being in the Yahoo directory really helped you in the Google SERPS circa 2001 — If I was launching a new site, I’d make some links from my ‘network’ and I’d be PR 5 right away. A friend of mine was jealous cause he was making web sites for real estate agents and other small business people and couldn’t do better than PR 3. Of course, he wasn’t very good at SEO, but neither was I.
Yahoo is weird at all. :) During the last weeks I tested one page on my site in Yahoo. I changed the meta description tag and the title tag. Looks like it works (the URL moved from 12-th to 5-th position until now).
However, I still would like to see my primary site ranked better in Yahoo because I am still wondering about potential traffic from it. People say that it has good potential, but Yahoo gives me about 5-6% of traffic only :( . Instead of it, Google brings me about 70% of all visits.
October 31st, 2007