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Basically, I tried the simple math way to work out the value. I worked out that over the past year or so, I have averaged $0.06 in revenue per unique vistor (mind you that's with fairly targeted clicks from other closely relevant sites and SERPs)
Soooo... $300 per Yahoo listing per year.
I would GUESS that I need 5000 clicks from it (either direct or indirect) in a 12 month period to breakeven, all else being equal.
Now 5000 clicks sounds like quite a bit to me from a directory listing. Works out to about 13 per day.
That just doesn't seem realistic to me. I would guess, depending on where they stick me (and that is a big if)... that I would get 2, maybe 3 clicks per day (~730-1100 per year) leaving the rest to be generated by improved rankings in search engines due to an authoritative site linking to me.
Will THAT generate another 4000 - 4500 clicks over a 12 month period? If someone can help me answer that question, that would be great.
And that's just to break even IF the current conversion rate holds.
the toughest part is predicting what kind of intangible and unquantifiable benefits you'll gain from a listing.
Due to this uncertainty I'm SOOO on the fence right now that it's killing me... i may just try it out for one year.
That was a horrible answer... sorry.
- Authoritative link
- Link from themed page
- Good neighborhood
- Traffic
- PR
If you want to list in a cat with 50 other sites, you may not get any directory traffic at all, but you need to decide if the other factors are worth $299 per year.
- Authoritative link
- Link from themed page
- Good neighborhood
- Traffic
- PR
I feel that the big negative to keep in mind is that a listing in the Yahoo Directory will affect the display of your home page title in Yahoo's crawler-based results. Yahoo replaces your title in the serps with the directory title, which, for commercial listings is usually the company name. Generally, that's not as good as the title you've given the page yourself. In my experience, that can cost you traffic from Yahoo search.
This happens only on the page listed in Yahoo... titles on your other pages returned in the serps are unaffected... but for me it's become an important consideration because my home pages do well in Yahoo.
Listings in some categories in Yahoo can perhaps be useful enough to outweigh this... say location-based travel listings like big-city hotels... but listings in many categories end up getting buried and don't bring in any traffic,
Regarding positive link reputation effects, I wish I knew for sure. Yahoo US uses redirects. Some foreign Yahoos mirror some of the categories in the US Yahoo, and they do transmit PR, etc, but I don't know that it's worth $299/year.
The question of TrustRank is one I've been mulling over recently. Yahoo would be a natural as a seed site. It's partially the reputation conveyed by links from Yahoo's human editing that helped Google's early serps. But Yahoo and Google are big competitors now, and I tend to doubt that Yahoo wants to share its editorial data with Google. I don't know whether they have an arrangement or not any more.
