The Yahoo directory money pit

[darin]

You pay and your chances of losing out on the deal are high.

I run a health site thats been in existence for about 1 year. The entire site of 600+ pages were created by me -its hard work but its starting to pay off. Since I'm an engineer by day and knew nothing about html a year ago it has been an adventure to gleen from every webboard and free tips website I could find to help me earn some extra cash from my business.
After getting a #7 listing in google for "weightloss herbs" and a #4 for "herbs supplements" and more than 30 others, I still stuggle with why yahoo isn't paying much attention. My site is even hosted by yahoo. One possible reason that my primary keyword is missing out in yahoo is that IMO I'm listed in the directory. Why you ask? Because they sometimes include a hideous description that shows up in the SERPS. This description, if by chance is not included at all, is taken from words found on-page. An on-page description would be better, but there is virtually no control over that...I have submitted change requests twice and still no action.
Conclusion: Although it will get your website crawled it is certainly not worth the price of admission. You can get your site crawled by simply getting a few links from a free directory or two or 10.
Another beef with yahoo...their spider is drunk. Its not predictable at all and sometimes passes out after a look at the homepage and then slowly moves on only to return a few weeks later and still not crawl the whole site...it could then come back the next day, burp, and leave again.

Any tips from the "SEO experts"?
BTY, IMO: 90% of SEO firms = ripoff

www.natureshealthypeople.com

[sytemaker]

Originally Posted by darin

Any tips from the "SEO experts"?
BTY, IMO: 90% of SEO firms = ripoff

My first tip is that the above isn't your best way to get advise from SEO experts. If 90% of SEO firms are a ripoff that could be interpreted by definition to be 90% of us. :-))

But anyway.

I can see your problem. Although your site shows in Yahoo at No. 6 and No. 18 for weightloss herbs it only comes in at No 89 for herbs supplements and your right the description sucks. Personally I have to agree with you in that I don't regard it as worthwhile to shell out 300 bucks a year for a Yahoo Directory listing. Particularly as one seems to have no control as to how that listing appears so if title and description aren't anything you're targeting you're basically stuffed. I would advise you (as I advise all my clients) to ditch the listing as soon as possible and instead submit the site to as many human edited free directories (the ones that don't insist on a link back) as you can. First you have more control about the listing as most of them let you enter your own description even if they insist on certain parameters. Secondly you get more links pointing at you this way and therefore more chances of getting spidered more often.

[brian.mark]

If you're ranking in Google, that means you have relevant links pointing to your pages using related keywords in the anchor text. Yahoo looks a lot at the page itself. H1, H2, H3 tags, strong text, topic, etc.

Since they look at such different factors, success on Google doesn't mean you'll have success on Yahoo.

As for Slurp, it takes some time. They have a bot that gets pages that have been visited already and tries to keep them fresh. Then they have a freshbot that follows to new links and gets new pages. The freshbot doesn't travel as often, so older sites tend to have a whole lot more indexed than any site launched in the past year. Each time, it travels a little deeper, but it does indeed take a long time.

As with anything that you don't have any control over, patience and persistence are needed for results.

Brian.

[darin]

I agree with both of you. Yahoo does indeed seem crawl a little depper each time it goes past the homepage. Also, I did not renew the directory listing and was waiting for it to expire when rest of the time is up - now I'm even thinking to request it be removed now.

Apologies for the earlier remark...there is a little "story" behind it as you might imagine..but I shouldn't take it out on you kind folks.

Best Regards,
Darin

[KeithO]

I have a few clients registed in the Y! Directory and they rank pretty well in Y!.