Should Google downgrade the importance

Of Yahoo! and Looksmart links?

[mack]

Just a thought but do you feel it would be a lot fairer if Google gave less weight to the importance of a yahoo! Or Looksmart listing. The reason I say this is simply because you need to pay to be listed on Looksmart, and in most cases Yahoo also. Is this not moving away from all out relevance and putting more emphasis on having to buy page rank?

[ferrari360]

My personal opinion is that a looksmart link is really not that valuable at all. Yahoo on the other hand is worth having - I imagine google's point of view is that the website has to undergo a check by "experts" in order to get listed - they would therefore view each addition to the directory as a more qualified link (even if it's paid for in the majority of cases).

I'd also imagine that they have some sort of pressure from yahoo to maintain the strong weighting factor - yahoo is after all a major investor and client of google.

[Beachboy]

Somebody made a post very recently to the effect that neither Dmoz or Yahoo links "weigh" any more than any other links. I believe that is the case, too. It is very easy to get about zero value from a listing in either directory. I regularly find sites ("pages") listed in Yahoo and Dmoz that have PR 2, and sometimes less. In order for a directory listing to "count" substantially, more is involved than merely a listing.

[taxpod]

I agree with Beachboy. All links weigh-in in accordance with their pagerank and the number of outbound links contained on the page.

Regarding Looksmart, why do you have to pay to get a listing? Just join Zeal and submit a bunch of pages including your own! And (see other thread), Looksmart links don't seem to count anyway since they disallow all spiders - see their robots.txt file. Zeal links count in accordance with the respective PR of the page from which you are linked so being in Looksmart via the Zeal route does seem to add value.

And philosophically, I agree with all of you that Yahoo, DMOZ, and Looksmart shouldn't be weighted any more than any other place (of course they're not) as the inclusion or exclusion of any page within these index sites confers no greater "seal of approval" than a link from any good site. Many times the links included in these sites are inferior to other sites' links. They are the best overall in a broad array of subjects but in my subject area I know of tons of sites with better links.

[chiyo]

We are being beaten on ranking on a few search terms by some sites which seemed to have much less PR, much less backlinks, poorer relevance and much poorer updating. Despite what we and they did, over many google updates they have been rock solid at the top two. When trying to find an answer, we are finding that in all cases we followed, the good rankers had both a yahoo and a Looksmart link.

To us, at least, a Looksmart link seems to be very valuable in Google, no matter how it actually manifests itself.

[angiolo]

Hi taxpod!

You suggestion regarding Zeal can work for new sites.

You should have a not commercial site to be listed in Zeal.

My experience, in these days, is that L$ is monitoring Zeal submissions: it is not possible to be listed in Zeal for a site that paid the L$ submission.