Client listed in Yahoo Directory

is this an SEO disadvantage?

[DXL]

Touched on this in another post, but I had added questions. I recently did a redesign for a new client listed in Yahoo's directory for a competitive field. My concern is that the home page is permanently indexed without the new title keywords it needed. Yahoo won't allow an update of the title if it isn't just the company name. So I'm wondering:

1. If Yahoo doesn't display the homepage title in its results, will Yahoo still factor in the keywords in the title and rank it well for them? i.e. would a site with a Yahoo directory title of "Company XYZ" still appear in the SERPs for "Blue Widgets" if those words were in the title but wouldn't show in the results?

2. If the homepage won't be indexed the way I want it to, should I only deep link to a specific page on the site with the title I intended for the homepage? That way its at least a page that will get results for their target keywords?

3. Should I consider having their site removed from Yahoo's directory?

[martinibuster]

Is the home page ranking in the top three for your keyword phrases?

[DXL]

Its not ranking in the top three for any of the target keywords.

[RichTC]

DXL

Your site will still rank with the directory title in our experience for VERY competetive keywords.

However, in our case our one site that was replaced with the directory title gets far less hits than when it carried our title tag.

I did think about asking for it to be removed from the directory but then you wonder if that would affect your positions. Shame you can use a No Yahoo Directory tag!

Rich

[DXL]

Your site will still rank with the directory title in our experience for VERY competetive keywords.

But do you think that's because of the use of anchor text from inbound links, or because Yahoo and Google are still paying close attention to the title tags even if they don't display them?

[Marcia]

The fact that they're using the Y! directory's title in the SERPs doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't look at your title and description for scoring purposes.

[jasoncrouch]

I feel that the inclusion in Yahoo's directory has harmed one of our sites.

We have two sites that we maintain. One site is #1 on Google for all of our major terms, but it doesn't really show up on any of these terms on Yahoo. The other site ranks well on Google and reasonably well in Yahoo. The site ranking well in Yahoo is NOT in the Yahoo directory, while the site that doesn't show up IS in the directory. I think this is related to the mandatory title (i.e. the same title must show up in the directory and in the organic serps).

I paid for inclusion about four years ago and I have never renewed this. I would really like to know how to get our site removed from the directory, as I think it would help with our placement.

Does anyone know how to get removed?

[DXL]

I imagine that you can just write to Yahoo to get it removed, assuming you do so from the email address used to set it up. I asked someone else what I should do the other day, they suggested getting a whole new domain name and starting from scratch. Considering my client had accidentally blocked all SE robots the last few years and doesn't have that many backlinks, perhaps that isn't a bad idea.