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The ordinary "new Yahoo" search description is much more complete and helpful, and substantially more likely to provide the searcher with a complete sense of the site's focus and content.
Are others seeing this? Unless, I'm missing something, this would sure discourage me from listing more sites in the Yahoo Directory. It feels like being penalized for the listing.
Love to hear from Tim or others in the know. Is my observation accurate as policy? Any reasons for Yahoo to deprecate only those site descriptions of sites in the paid directory? (One of the cool advantages of Yahoo's results are the generally more elaborate and detailed description/abstracts!)
Thanks!
I mentioned this in the Supporters Forum, when Tim asked for feedback there, and the consensus was that no one liked it.
Tim - Thanks for your responses on both threads. OK... now what can we do about it? It's a real problem. Why in the world is Yahoo continuing to do this?
People unsubscribed from Looksmart just to get rid of the T&D in Inktomi.
Right now, there are four sites that I've been keeping out of Yahoo until this is cleared up, and there are several more where I'm on the verge of suggesting we just drop the listing.
Anyone else?
Folks are ignoring the best content top search result sites because your directory descriptions & titles are absolutely truncated and displayed in an inferior way to the rest of your SERPS. (And, again, ironically, your detailed descriptions, excerpting and ordinary display approach is one of your competitive advantages over Google!)
Seems like this will hurt directory renewals bigtime!
Larry
Directory titles work great in the Directory because all the other listings are similarly ordered (Site Title, Site Description). All else is more or less equal.
Mixing the Directory titles into the regular serps doesn't work because the Directory Titles are inappropriate for the context. Like putting a round peg in a square hole.
Dave
Absolutely. Actually, I have yet to hear a Yahoo! rep give ONE SINGLE reason why someone should bother with the directory assuming that you get zero traffic as a direct result of it with the exception of Tim saying that you will get crawled :)
This would be the best for both Yahoo, the site, and internet visitors at large. There would be some value in our listing with the directory (PR value, separate listing in directory) but it would not hurt us in the SERPS or reduce our visibility and usefulness to folks accessing Yahoo's WEB results.
How about it, Yahoo! Do you hear our concern?
We are reviewing this process...
Yahoo, Yahoo_Mike! That is good news. Without pushing you folks on this, any guess when we can expect a decision? My listing situation right now really is on the brink of whether to pull some sites out or not.
I'd include pulling out all references to the Yahoo directory listing on the crawler-based serps. I have some clients with local listings doing international business, because that's the way the directory is structured, and the local category names appearing in the serps are definitely hurting them too.
Yes, if you are in the directory, we use that information in the Search Results listing. We are reviewing this process to provide additional ways for sites to be listed rather than always using the directory information.
This is not always true. I have a site for which I pay for SiteMatch which is in the directory, yet it always displays the meta title and description.
Does anyone know if you were to go in and remove your site from the directory, would that cause the directory descriptions in the regular serps to go away too?
I have a site I stopped paying for to be listed in the directory over 6 months ago. Guess what? It is still there. Their directory is a mess. I wish I had a nickel for every dead link I could point out in it.
