Yahoo pulling a Looksmart.

Chances of Yahoo charging for all the grandfathered listings.

[lgn]

We were fortunate to get listed with Yahoo and with all the major search engines, back in 1998 and 1999 when things were free.

There is a vast pool of listings that fall in this category.

We are worried that Yahoo, may see this as a quick source of income, and will pull a Looksmart.

Can you imagine the revenue Yahoo would generate, if it went after all the grandfathered free or pay once listings.

If we didn't pay up, our good listings in Google would suffer.

Any body feeling the same paranoia?

[Mark_A]

Nope, the opposite in fact..

If all the free listings were removed it would make the case better for pay for inclusion, less noise to be lost in.

[msr986]

I don't think Y! will consider this move, not unless they are looking to kill off their directory.

[Learning Curve]

I'm certainly not planning to pay $299 for Y! Express every single year, forever, when the vast majority of my competitors in my regional (low PR) category get it for free. Why buy the cow when your competitors get the milk for free?

[born2drv]

lgn,

Y! would never remove anyone from the Google SERPS that didn't pony up some cash. That goes against the FTC's regulations and they would have to go on record as stating that sites in the web search are essentially paid advertisements, which is what users do not like.

Y! also wants to keep people clicking on their OVER PPC ads which is why they have to present useful, biased-free and non-paid ads. If they do something as you suggested, the users would go somewhere else they could get non-paid ads, and they could kiss their OVER profit sharing revenue goodbye. That's the reason Y! had to clean up the SERPs, they are not stupid.

Any loss they suffer from reduced directory listings will be more than compensated by the revenue sharing of OVER PPC ads once users start coming back to Y! after they see the change.

[chiyo]

im pretty sure its the opposite no? While all the turmoil was going in in LS, grandfathered listings were left listed i thought.

One of our sites has had around 5 pages inserted in the Y! directory for free and without asking in the past year. We did notice these got good referrals from Y!, even though in our opinion they were not necessarily the best. These 5 pages have dropped suddenly since the change, so I'm not sure, as many here, how much a ldirectory listing is worth. If Y! were to drop these pages, we would not pay for listing, on simple economics.

In fact we would be much happier if 2 or our grandfathered listings in Y! were dropped altogether. They are now returning misleading and old titles and descriptions in YAhoo SERPS since our site focus changed since they were listed 5 years or more ago, even though they are RANKED on the basis of the current titles and content! We also think this has meant that we are getting less referrals on these now overall, than we got when they were listed correctly in Webpages (yahoo.google) The advantage of them being now on the default Y first page SERPS has been offsett or indeed a net loss.