Yahoo Directories Can Hurt Your Site!

About 1 year ago I contacted the fine people at Yahoo to find out why I could never get a client’s site indexed beyond the main index page. After checking to make sure that the site wasn’t in violation of any of their rules I sent an email to Yahoo to discuss my findings.

The only thing that I could discern was that the earliest information regarding this domain was still being listed in several of their directories. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing but seeing as the site changed ownership and focus back in 1996, the old directory listings are completely wrong.

Provided with this information it was fairly easy for someone at Yahoo to ascertain that this was the issue and I was told that they would address this issue soon. They even went so far as to extend to me an invitation to send in follow up questions to which I only received a standard form email, totally unacceptable! Well it has been a long time now and Yahoo doesn’t seem to want to address this issue.

After a few months of waiting I asked if it would be helpful if I were to resubmit my client’s site to the directories and paid for re-inclusion. Typically – I got the standard form response once again. With this kind of customer service is it any wonder that Yahoo.com is losing market and search share?

My only hope now is that someone over a Yahoo might read this and become concerned enough about their product to try to improve it. While I can’t reveal the site here, as that would not be appropriate to this forum, I can assure those of you who might read this; the site is obviously an old site and probably one that predates Yahoo itself.

If the Yahoo directories are so flawed that it takes more than 11 years to update the information contained within, what good are they? If these old directories are having a negative effect on my client’s site and have been doing so for more than a decade, I can only suggest that if Yahoo refuses to fix this issue then I would strongly suggest caution to those webmasters who were thinking of including their sites within the Yahoo directories.

It would be cool if someone from Yahoo were to contact me through a private email in this forum and follow up on this issue.