what decides if your site is one of the "Most Popular"?

a human or pagerank or link pop or?

[Perfection]

In some of the categories of the Yahoo directory, there are a handful of sites listed at the top under "Most Popular." How does Yahoo decide which sites are most popular? Is it a human editor or are they actually checking your link popularity or maybe even using pagerank?

I ask because in 1 category one of my site's has been listed under "Most Popular" for a couple of months and sometime in the last week or so has been removed from there. Link pop hasn't changed, well actually, it has increased. I do see a new site listed under "Most Popular" now that mine is out of there. So maybe they will only keep a specific number of sites listed there and if a more popular one comes along, it knocks out the least popular. Only problem with that is my site happens to have more backlinks then a few of the other sites still considered "Most Popular." So now I wonder, what exactly decides what sites are listed under "Most Popular"?

[DaveN]

Good question wish I Knew the answer ::bump::

DaveN

[coconutz]

I had the same question awhile back.

Yahoo's Most Popular Listings [webmasterworld.com]
Any recent changes?

Previous discussions:

Yahoo's Most Popular Listings [webmasterworld.com]
What's the scoop?

Yahoo Most Popular [webmasterworld.com]
Link Popularity or Click Thru's

Yahoo Most Popular section part 2 [webmasterworld.com]

[2_much]

That's one Yahoo mystery I've not known anyone to crack. It's random enough to make it difficult to understand. It seems to differ per category.

[coconutz]

I checked the category today and my site is now listed in the Most Popular section in the 4th position. I did follow some of the suggestions listed in the referenced discussions.

[mosley700]

That's one Yahoo mystery I've not known anyone to crack. It's random enough to make it difficult to understand. It seems to differ per category.

Just ask. I did. The editor told me that it's an automatic algo. I asked if it was based on inbound links a la PR, and the answer seemed to suggest that it was click-through based. The only thing he sounded sure of was that it's an automated thing, not human.

[2_much]

Makes sense Mosley, there are too many categories for them to be updated manually. But perhaps there's an automatic algo, with the ability for the editors to add sites they like?

[stevegpan2]

Well, I saw my site in the most popular before and now its done.
I believe it's pr based as some of the most popular sites rank below me on alexa.