The value of a Yahoo! Directory listing goes up as your site becomes more popular. On Yahoo.com, but not on its international counterparts, listings are sorted by popularity and, supposedly, relevance. In the past two months, I got 4 visitors from a listing halfway on page 3 of a category three levels deep. That's not too bad, especially considering that these are very targeted visitors with low bounce rates and an above-average number of pageviews per visitor. Admittedly, at 4 visitors every two months, or 24 per year, I am paying roughly $12.50 per click, and I am certainly not making that much per visitor to the site. Once Google Adsense statistics are included in Google Analytics, it will be interesting to see how valuable Yahoo! Directory traffic is for this particular site.
The site has been growing steadily for the past half year, and it will be equally interesting to see the shift in traffic when the listing moves up to the first page of the category. If you compare it to the traffic increase seen when you move up on a search engine results page for a particular query, a page one listing could be quite valuable, but that will, of course, depend largely on the popularity of the category.
A $300/month sponsor listing for the category would put me near the very top of the first page, which might be an interesting experiment if it weren't for all the scary reports of billing issues related to sponsor listings. Also, they would have to send me over 250 visitors per day for it to be directly worth the money, which does not seem very feasible.
All in all, it depends too much on the category and on your position within that category, so there is no one answer to the question of whether or not it is worth to be listed in the Yahoo! Directory. If you have the money, find the appropriate category for your site and try to analyze it thoroughly before submitting. How many other listings and other types of links (e.g. sponsored listings and category links) does it contain? How many levels deep is it from the directory homepage? How many clicks does it take to get from the Directory homepage to your category? Some categories are linked directly from the Directory homepage. Will this link give my site an edge over my competitors? Consider the fact that you can cancel your listing after a year if it turns out not to be worth the money. Also note that there may be some other benefits tied to a directory listing, like increased trust in the eyes of particular search engines, as mentioned before. Hard to track, but worth considering.

Labels: Yahoo

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