Just because of Money, Yahoo sold off themself

[jamesyap]

Before there is something call express submission, yahoo editors has a strict listing guidelines. Because they follow this guidelines, they directory are great and is a useful resources.

But ever since there is a express submission program, yahoo has sold themself for the small fee of $299! They seems like accept anything the people submit, any title and any descrition.

For example, look at this directory <snip>
They accept people to submit so many listing started with #,!, and combination of them such as! and! #!

! (this is from me)

Old days, they people tried to rank higher by having A, or ABC, then AAA, later they use numbers, 1, 123, the laters they even use 0 which is quite strange!

And now, there are #1 blar blar blar and I am surprice to see!, and!

[edited by: NFFC at 10:43 am (utc) on Feb. 1, 2003]
[edit reason] Specifics removed [/edit]

[Shakil]

James,

as much as I sympathise with you, however

Money talks, and Bx@#x%$&& walks!

They are running a business and need to bring in the results, any means possible.

If your competitors are doing this, and beating you in traffic, then maybe thats the route to take.

For about the first 18mths of our main site going live, we tried to play a very clean game, however the cleaner we played, the dirtier the competition got.

They started seeing our kindness as weakness, so unless radical changes were made, these guys were gonna blow us out of the market which WE created.

all is fair in love and war.

Shak

[Zapatista]

Oh yea, biz express editors are definitely pros*****s. They'll take any site that waves $300 and doesn't have broken links. Mirror duplicate? Doesn't matter. Search quality, spam - who cares.

Their desperation is pathetic and shameful.

I could cite many more examples of this suicide flirting search engine but I don't want to get on a rant.

[vibgyor79]

Hmm.. I wonder if www.!@#$123aaa.com domain name is available....

[skibum]

It was probably easier to just take the cash adn list the sites that face potential chargebacks and have to deal with people bitching about their!@#1....... sites not getting accepted but getting charged $300.00.

Everybody lost in the end, but at least YAHOO! collected some $$$ for their headaches.

[riley coyote]

I had two sites turned down by the Express Submission. $598 down the drain! Yahoo's reason - there were too many sites already listed with the same information. I wrote back to have them reconsider with my reasons why I thought the site had "unique content" and a rather rude message came back with another no. Go figure.

[Winooski]

riley coyote (great name, welcome to WebmasterWorld!), what kind of rude message did you receive? Would you be able to paste the body here?

We had a client over a year ago which was rejected by Yahoo.com Business Express because the site didn't have unique content, i.e., a bazillion pages of little more than order buttons, and few pictures. The client was too busy getting the store opened to appeal, and that was that, but the experience was an eye-opener as far as having a legitimate site rejected goes.

[riley coyote]

Hi Winooski, Thanks for the nice welcome. It has been about a year since this e-mail was received from Yahoo. The site was about 75 pages of fresh content and done fairly well. The 2nd response bascially said they had the right to refuse any site and too bad. It really seemed like they did not read my reasons why the site had unique content. The e-mail I sent definitely was not too long, maybe too short?

I did not reply again and worked on the other SE's.

[jamesyap]

When u mention about 1 year ago, I laugh. Yahoo has change their policy now, what junk site could also be included even if your site has only 1 or 2 pages of a few order now buttons.

Reason is simple, last time, search results are directory 1st, google 2nd, but now search results are google 1st, directory no where! Not much people want to pay the $299! Except those guys who have site with 1-2 pages and some order buttons! ;)

[beren]

That's interesting - a loosening in admission standards to the directory. In March of last year I submitted a site through Yahoo Express - $299 - and they turned me down. And it didn't surprise me that much - the site was not unique, just a Spanish language page of a site already in the directory.

However, I notice that the site is included in my list of sites and the list seems to imply that they will charge me another $299 next month. Which would be OK if they were going to put the site in their directory. But it's not OK if they aren't. I'm not paying Yahoo $299 every year indefinitely after they turned down the site.

Maybe with their new policy they are planning to put the site in next month. Otherwise, I will have to complain if they attempt to charge $299 to the credit card.

[riley coyote]

If they do charge your credit card with no listing, simply do a charge back. Trust me, as a credit card merchant the customer wins most of the time! :( If you do not receive a service or product as promised you do not have to pay.

[jamesyap]

Hi RILEY! Tremendous IDEA! ;) Why I have never think of it. Sometimes even if you receive a product, you can still easily do a chargeback, not to say now you get nothing! Good Point Good Point.