seoArt - 5:47 pm on Mar 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

I actually have a site in a good category where I get enought traffic to make it well worth the $300 / yr. The category also has decent PageRank and excellent relevance therefore probably some SEO benefit as well.

As with all advertisements, for SEO or not, I need to evaluate where the link will be placed and the qualities of the page it will be on in order to determine it's value. Sometimes I don't know whether a link will be a good investment until I try it out. Other times it's quite obvious that I would be wasting my money.

Here are a few tips for evaluating a Yahoo directory listing:

1. Do a Y! directory search first to find the most appropriate category for your listing. Don't choose the one you want because of PR or how high up it is, because the editor will probably place your site in the most appropriate category.

2. Ask yourself - how many other sites are listed in this category? Is my link likely to be buried on Page 2 or 3, or is it more likely to be near the top of page 1? Does the category itself have any Google search rankings for keywords relevant to your site? If so you may be able to get traffic from it.

3. From an SEO perspective, does the category have PageRank? Usually top tier categories have some decent PageRank, but as you go down deeper into the directory they don't. Number of outgoing links in a category is an issue here too. If you're likely to be buried on the 2nd or 3rd category page there will be less value.

4. From an SEO perspective relevance is important - how relevant is this directory category to my keywords?

5. Trust factors - is that category linking out to other good sites, or linking out to some expired domains or bad neighborhoods? Y! directory is one of the oldest most trusted web directories so there is usually some trust value associated with a link from here.

So as you can see, there are some instances where a Y! directory link will be valuable and others where it won't, it just depends on your niche.