Yahoo Gives Away Free Small Business WebSites

[Brett_Tabke]

[listings.local.yahoo.com...]

Promote your business to highly qualified prospects in your area by listing your business on Yahoo! Local. Each listing features detailed information that sets your business apart. Plus, now every business in the U.S. can get a FREE web site.

Press Release [home.businesswire.com]

[surfin2u]

I just attempted to sign up for a free site. I put in my info and then ended up on a page that demanded payment and gave no other options. The signup page had in info link saying that I'd be able to get a freebie. I'm not sure whether I got one or not.

[surfin2u]

I think I misunderstood what was being offered. You must pay to be a store, then you get a basic website free. I'll wait and see what happens and post back here.

[whoisgregg]

The free sites are all at 2letterstate.local.yahoo.biz. Think the screwed up robots.txt at [yahoo.biz...] is preventing any search engine (including yahoo) from crawling the subdomains? Or is too new?

[janethuggard]

I had no problem getting the listing, or the free website.

I can see why they offered it. The yahoo ads on the right dominate the page. The visitor has to scroll to see the content of your pages.

They get tons of free websites to advertise their ppc ads on. If they get enough of those (six figures) they might not ever need publishers, like Adsense is using.

Something to think about.

[Jane_Doe]

I just sent the link to a friend with a local business who asked me to help him put up a site. It looks like something perfect for him.

[StupidScript]

No problem getting the free site/listing. There is a second option that costs money ("Enhanced"), so be sure to pick the right one on the first page.

The ads on the right can be hidden easily by clicking on the little tab thingy at the top of the border between the ads and the content. I like that.

Hopefully, this will help get our sites back into the regular Yahoo SERPS index. They dropped all pages but one from all of our sites on Jan. 1, 2005, and we have yet to see them return despite many gigabytes of transfers to the Inktomi bot. Yahoo support says to get a directory listing, which we already had, so hopefully this will help them find a place for us in their SERPS. Fingers crossed!

[twist]

The yahoo ads on the right dominate the page.

and when they get a large enough user base, here comes the popups, popunders and more ads crammed around your business info. Of course for a small fee of $x00.00 a month they will happily remove all the ads ;)

[surfin2u]

Just created a couple of listings and free websites. I guess I clicked on the wrong button the first time. Very simple and easy to build a small website. Haven't had a chance to see my listing yet, since it's pending review.

[Fortune]

When you look in the source you see that they are using the Geocities engine to create the pages.

[geocities.com...]

I guess it was part of the acquasition rebranding of technology with a marketing twist.