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I was hoping by now I would see some change - but notta. I know with the new purchase of Inktomi that this may be a super bonus for the directory listings. But my sites have received about 70% less traffic since the yahoo switch. I could not afford to fork out $600 to yahoo - I'd rather pay to get into some of the other SEs at this point. My yahoo listing have done ZERO for my Google rankings.
I'm just hoping something changes soon. I really don't want to cancel my listings in yahoo. But they are leaving with no choice right now.
Anyone else canceling? If you want to get into your account to view all of your recurring site fees, you can simply go into the directory, and click any category. Then you click on submit site. To the left, they'll be a link that says something like "Manage Listings". Then you click on that and from there you can view all of your listing along with renewal dates. And if you choice to cancel, it's very simple, you just click on "How do I cancel?" in the top right hand side and it'll have a button to cancel. Just thought this would be usesful information.
Whether you actually need a cow is a different issue.
But they give me dividends by having my site listed there.
Same concept.
That's a ridiculous analogy! I don't know how you can even compare the 2! Did Yahoo stop listing your site? No, like SteveB said they reformatted it, they didn't stop printing it! They never told you that they were never going to change.
Do you really think so? They certainly don't deliver the content to as many eyeballs now. For me that's the same as a printed directory not being distributed so widely.
If I paid for a Yellow Pages ad and they decided to only deliver it to a few streets in the town to save on printing costs I think I'd have a right to be upset.
Look man, I really have no beef with Yahoo. My site is tops on google, so I really don't care. This is just about business ethics, and whatever you say, Yahoo's suck and so do Looksmart's. Same Same.
The analogy is fine it just needs refinement.
You put an ad in the yellow pages because it is delivered to every ones front door.
Unfortunately, for you the phone company decides to bury the book under the front lawn instead of delivering it to the front door.:(
How’s that for a switch and bait.....(from our dear friends at yahoo)
Actually, we paid for a cow and got a goat. A male goat.
As Bob Hope said - "Even if you get something out of it, you probably would not want to drink it".
And so back to integrity (or lack of it) and the value of trading with a partner who will hide behind the small print when they rip you off.
The real world is not written in small print. It comprises relationships. I think by now though, most people understand the value of a relationship with Yahoo... watch your back because what you see may not be what you get.
I also see steveb's still citing his ROI arguments... but again, these are based on expectation... expectation that the investment will be valid for longer than one day. Sadly, you just can't expect or rely on that with Yahoo. They may dump you tomorrow - after all, it's in the small print.
That is the chance you take in any relationship! People keep talking about the small print. Well it is part of the contract! Everybody here has signed a contract that had small print and I can guarantee you that you didn't read it. Did you know that there is a lot of pertininent information in the small print? So please quit whining about Yahoo not being fair (what in this world is?). They never ever guaranteed you placement or traffic. And they never ever guaranteed that they would keep their directory the default serp!
I have no problem at all with anyone dealing with Yahoo (or L$, who are worse), but don't expect me to... and don't expect me to stop pointing out that value is more than small print in a contract.
Often, those who live by the small print alone will eventually perish by it... including their cheerleaders on the touchlines. It will be difficult to shed tears for them when that happens.
With Yahoo recruiting a leading PPC merchant, the further demise of the directory may actually come sooner rather than later.
I don't have any religious feeling about Yahoo, but I definitely come down on the side of the posters who feel that a reasonable person coughing up $300 for each site's listing wouldn't expect the listings to be blasted to oblivion a few weeks later. Nor would a reasonable business partner make that kind of unilateral decision. A company that decided to make a major change like this and that wanted to operate with integrity would not thumb its nose at its customers and fall back on fine print - it would offer some kind of a cancellation window for recent listings and some partial compensation (listing extensions? partial refunds? free clicks on paid listings?) for older listings. I'm sure 99% of the paid listing purchasers would do absolutely nothing, but with this approach Yahoo could silence its critics and feel, rightly, that it had done the right thing.
And that is the crux of the whole issue. Not the fine print, not the weasel phrases.
Yahoo pushed their paid listing AND as part of their advertising prominently stated how widely used their directory was.
Now the directory is practically hidden, which to me is false advertising.
This thread is divided sharply into two camps. Those who will renew for whatever profit it brings and those who feel betrayed when Yahoo broke their hearts by switching default listing lovers.
I can admire those who stick to their principles and refuse to renew out of a sense of Yahoo injustice. And I can understand the logic of those who would renew for any small profit it would bring.
One year in internet time is a decade in the brick and mortar world if you consider 1999 almost "ancient history" in terms of internet marketing. The web is about as calm as rollercoaster and it is this instability Yahoo has proven itself capable of that would lead me away from investing high dollar amounts into resubmitting several sites for Yahoo "review."
Not knowing what the year may bring with Yahoo and their recent purchase of inktomi, I would invest that money into:
1. Buying dropped domains that were grandfathered in Yahoo.
2. Doing quality link exchanges. (My link exchanges bring me more traffic than Yahoo directory.
3. Increasing my content.
Investing my money in those three simple methods seems more reliable and long-term to me than a directory listing in Yahoo at the moment.
There is going to be a major fight among the top 4 - AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google - to gain or keep market share. The two weakest players in that line-up are AOL and Yahoo.
When I entered internet marketing in early 2001, Yahoo was the King and a top listing in there was the holy grail.
Now where are they? They're forced to use Google as the default to keep from losing searchers. They are top-heavy with banners, slow loading flash ads, pop-ups, and redirects through pages that only exist to show you adverstising. The size of the mailbox shrunk from 8 mb to 6 then to 4mb and even tho I pay $50 a year for a 100mb mailbox, they don't have the courtesy to offer me ads free email service with my annual subscription.
One might argue they need to make a profit but this is anti-marketing. Like a Russian Mafia porn site(3 pops for every window), the more desperate and aggressive they get, the more marketing laws they will break and push people away.
And buying inktomi was colosally stupid. It will take years and years for them to see a return on that $235 million mistake. They don't have years and years. This competition war will be over by then. Besides, their directory algo is better than inktomi's. That was like buying a KIA when you already owned a Jaguar.
And like that roller coaster which goes up and down, the internet moves fast. Major changes can literally happen overnight. I would sit tight with investing in Yahoo right now. It could be a vastly different picture for them a year from today. But if you invest time/money in such basic principles like quality link exchanges, adding more content and mining for dropped domains, you will find much more stability then from what I percieve is a wounded Yahoo.
Zapatista
Yahoo seems to be trying to go in two different directions - legitimate for profit type things, like the Yahoo stores and web hosting, and trying to be a search engine/directory portal in a world where it is clearly outclassed and outmaneuvered.
They are going to have to make up their mind what they want to be, and do that one thing well. Right now I would give them about a 5 or 6 on ecommerce, and a 3 or 4 on being a search portal.
As far as MSN goes, I am not sure they are even in the fight. It took them 5 weeks to fix my email, so I don't have a lot of faith in them in this arena ;p
Clearly, the answer to the first question is site and ROI dependent - if the traffic and profits are still sufficient to more than pay for the cost of being listed, then yes, it's worthwhile. The second is a bit tougher, but I'd guess most would agree that Yahoo's spirit of partnership hasn't been exemplary in the recent directory de-emphasis.
The two issues merge, though, because many business people don't look at issues from a dispassionate ROI viewpoint. They feel that if a partner has let them down badly, they don't want to deal with that partner - even if they could make a few bucks more. I tend toward the dispassionate side of things, but I certainly wouldn't fault anyone who took a bit more emotional stand for integrity.
Even though they may have stuck to the legal definition of their biz express agreement, they shattered their integrity with webmasters.
Using your argument, Yahoo should not have high expectations of webmasters renewing their biz express listings. Afterall, the webmasters never promised Yahoo anything either.
Now that they have one hurdle for their radio station subscription service cleared, they are going to have to sell 8.33 yearly subscriptions ($36/year) to make up for 1 biz express customer they lost.
The internet graveyard is full of internet companies with "bright ideas."
The holy grail in this business is not to make $1 million or even $5k in one month, but to last. Longevity. If myself or Yahoo wants to be a long-term internet company, then we have to do it with honor and integrity.
Some of you guys really need to step back and consider how self-absorbed your position is. There NEVER was a reasonable expectation of that at all. Some people paid $300 and were 180th in the directory search for their main keyword. You guys who randomly were at the front just don't seem to get that what happened to you was different than what happened to others.
In my area there are 200 or so directory sites. Two hundred. By your logic 170 or so of them should have been up in arms *before* because they weren't magically the lucky ones who appeared first in those gibberish directory results that used to appear. One company paid for 40+ "fraternal mirror" doorway sites as their method of getting four listed in the top ten. Others of their sites were 105th and 190th and so on.
There simply is no logic to your complaints that your random luck went from good to less good. The folks who were 180th and now don't have competitors locking up the top search spots by random luck sure aren't going to be complaining about how NOW Yahoo has betrayed them. There is more to the world than your tiny corner of it.
I just lost my "most popular" link, and its hurting my referals, but they never said they would give me one and they never said they wouldn't give my competitors one.
Even so, my good ranking is not "random." I am also grandfathered in. I do not have the problems people have here. I offer my opinions of Yahoo based on a more unbiased observation of their business and marketing practices.
Renew, don't renew. I don't care. You should diversify your traffic sources anyway which is why I recommended quality link exchanges and adding content. If I had a choice to spend $300 doing that or $300 on a biz express renewal, I would not choose Yahoo for reasons I already explained on my two previous messages in this thread.
There simply is no logic to your complaints that your random luck went from good to less good.
Ah. There's the rub rogerd. Luck had nothing at all to do with it.
Before the downplay of the directory results the SERPs were anything but random.
Hundreds of webmasters had their algo down cold and had an entire business model hinged on the methodical building of domains purely for Yahoo rankings.
Predictably, such businesses were crushed.
I had two projects that were largely Yahoo dependent, but never had any illusions about their long term stability.
If the success of these two endeavors had been the sole basis of my financial well being, of course I'd be more dismayed than I am... but I wouldn't have blamed Yahoo.
I would have only myself to blame for poor risk management.
Maybe in a parallel dimension. When 40 nearly identical sites with identical everything range in rank from first to last, that's random.
"Hundreds of webmasters had their algo down cold..."
Submitting duplicate domains is now having an algo "down cold"? 'fraid not. It's just delusion to think good ranking in that random mess was the result of good work.
I guess I must be one of the deluded ones. My worst ever ranking was number 8. But I never thought I was doing "good" work. Just the necessary evil :)
Maybe in a parallel dimension. When 40 nearly identical sites with identical everything range in rank from first to last, that's random.
Such categories were the exceptions not the rule.
There are dozens of webmasters besides myself that can boast a virtually 100% success rate in nailing a top 3 spot guaranteed, and in many cases these listings maintained their position for over 6-12 months without challenge... while being profitable in their first week.
The professional color-by-number Yahoo jockeys didn't bother with the categories that were glutted with perfectly optimized listings and heavy competition. They excelled in identifying the countless profitable niches where a top listing was virtually guaranteed.
It's just delusion to think good ranking in that random mess was the result of good work.
The domain jockeys didn't build for the categories where the results were even slightly "random". Just like in traditional keyword research for the search engines they would find and exploit profitable niches in Yahoo's easily manipulated system.
Good work? Depends on your barometer.
Consistently successful? You bet.
Profitable? Absolutely.
Bound to come to an end? Certainly.
Anybody that didn't see it coming had their blinders on.
