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.

Yahoo to support 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags

For those of you who do not know that the ODP or the Open Directory Project, can sometimes override the descriptions on your site in the organic search listings.

The reason that this could be bad for your site is that the editors at the ODP don’t take your SEO efforts in to account when they write their descriptions. While a link from the ODP can be good in terms of helping your ranking in the search engines this benefit can also hamper your conversion due to some less than flattering description of your site.

Myself, I have always tried to write decent descriptions that accurately describe what any given page is about so as to help searchers make an informed decision on whether or not to visit my site. To have those efforts thrown out because some search engine decided take a short cut and allow someone who doesn’t represent my site or products write about them has always been a bit of a sore spot within the SEO community.

It only took a few years for some of the search engines to catch on to this complaint and address it, Google being the first with Yahoo was soon following suit. With that little problem addressed it seemed that a similar situation might be happening with old Yahoo Directory listings as well.

Back in late February 2007 the Yahoo search blog posted this information regarding the their own directory Titles and abstracts…

We’re adding support for the Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR’ that will complement the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag, which we already support. If you’re unfamiliar, the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While we continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory. So, as promised, we’re
providing support for ‘NOYDIR’ which will recognize the following Meta tags on
your pages:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR"

or (don't forget to add the "<" and ">" to the meta tags)

META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR"

For pages with this tag, we will not use Yahoo! Directory titles or
abstracts for your URL in web search results. This will grant webmasters the ability to participate in the Yahoo! Directory Submit program and benefit from inclusion in the Yahoo! Directory, while maintaining control over URL titles and abstracts in search. This will not have any effect on the Yahoo! Directory Search experience, which will continue to use the Yahoo! Directory and title abstract information.

We are re-indexing content on the web to launch this change, and you should immediately begin to see the changes on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Korea. (Other regions will roll-out in the future.) This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling that is typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions, please refer to our webmaster resources page or visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks!
Priyank GargProduct Manager, Yahoo! Search

Thanks Privank and here is to hoping that this little tag may help fix some issues that I have heard complaints about over the years!