What is the Yahoo Directory?
Someone asked me the other day, “Just what is the Yahoo! Directory?” I culled together a few sources along with my own notes and produced this overview. Perhaps someone will find it useful!
Yahoo Directory
Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web’s oldest “directory,” a place where human editors organize web sites into categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant shift to crawler-based listings for its main results. This establishes two main “parts” of the Yahoo search base: crawler-based listings and directory listings.Crawler-based listings are what most people are familiar with – when you go to www.yahoo.com and perform a search, crawler-based listings are generally what’s returned. Crawler-based listings are not reviewed by a human. Instead, they are based upon URLs the Yahoo spider has found and ranked according to an internal algorithm.The Yahoo Directory still survives. You’ll notice “category” links below some of the sites lists in response to a keyword search. When offered, these will take you to a list of web sites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor.It’s also possible to do a pure search of just the human-compiled Yahoo Directory, which is how the old or “classic” Yahoo used to work. To do this, search from the Yahoo Directory home page, as opposed to the regular Yahoo.com home page. Then you’ll get both directory category links (“Related Directory Categories”) and “Directory Results,” which are the top web site matches drawn from all categories of the Yahoo Directory.Sites pay an annual fee to be included in the Yahoo Directory’s commercial listings, though they must meet editor approval before being accepted. Submission to the directory and payment of the fee doesn’t guarantee ranking, it only guarantees that Yahoo! will review the site.The biggest advantage to getting listed in the the Yahoo! Directory is the link authority the directory carries. In other words, a human has manually reviewed the site and is vouching that it is of generally good quality. Because of this, the Directory is known to be an authority. Sites with authority confer authority by linking to other sites. Sites seen as an authority on a topic rank well in all search engines.
[tags]Yahoo directory,Yahoo![/tags]
Written by jclayc on September 26th, 2006 with
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