I have made this post as a warning to other website owners to beware the Yahoo directory.
I submitted a site to them last May and paid the $299 review fee. Yahoo say the site will be reviewed within days and an e-mail will explain reasons for non inclusion if site is not accepted.

Approx a month after receiving nothing I did find our website had been included in the directory. Unfortunately in the incorrect category. Since then I have repeatedly requested the site be added to the correct category. The e-mail response was that it had been incorrectly categorised and that after a few days the site would be included in the correct category. Well here we are in Jan 2008 and it's still not!

Next moan. The same website used to appear quite well for our keyphrases in Yahoo search but following a cosmetic only revamp only the index page is now indexed. I decided that probably to verify the site with Yahoo may rectify this, it didn't. Neither did submitting an XML feed sitemap. Again I have politely e-mailed Yahoo about this. I even asked them directly if the site was being penalised. One lady did reply to me saying it wasn't penalised and the problem was with Yahoo. Months later still only the index page is included! The same site ranks well in both MSN and Google with all pages indexed.

Next moan. The new revamped Yahoo search marketing interface is yet still slower to use than it's previous Overture and not as straightforward, worse still some of the keyphrases I've bid on don't come up when using Yahoo Search. Often in the sponsored results all you see is "Advertise your site here". Well I'm trying to do just that.

So my experience of Yahoo is that they clearly have no interest in website owners. Anyone else had similar experiences?