Is Yahoo Directory worth $300?

[kchan]

Hello,

If your in the real estate business, $299 doesn't seem too steep to pay, so I would say it is worth it.  It's an authority link and highly trusted but I doubt it will improve your rankings because I believe your competitors would also have a link on the directory.  From personal experience I find that having alternative high quality links your competitors don't have, works better than having the same link.

[bronxpad]

So for real estate where are the best places to have quality links from? Thanks for your help.

[ZacharyRussell]

I agree,

Your best bet is to find unique quality links from websites, preferably related to your industry, that can give you quality links to yourself. As a rule of thumb, you want to stay away from paid links, however, because you don't want to get penalized for paid links.

[ZacharyRussell]

Try some websites that revolve around your community. If you have an authoritive community blog, or something like that, I highly recommend it.

[bronxpad]

So Yahoo directory even though it's supposed to be an authority would still be considered as a paid link? I thought they were in the category of trusted directories since inclusion is not guaranteed.

[EGOL]

I believe that the Yahoo Directory can be valuable for a new site that is struggling to get its first few highly trusted links.

Do a google search like this for a site that is already in the directory:

site:dir.yahoo.com  "somesite.com"

You might see that the site is getting links from a few yahoo pages, maybe they are in au.dir.yahoo.com and dir.yahoo.com and others.

So, I use the Yahoo Directory for sites that are a few years old or sites that are  in very close competition.

I would not pay $300/year for a mature site because once the site is established with a good link profile or dominant in its niche  the value of the Yahoo Directory is tiny in comparison to other site assets.

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your advice, my site is 7 months old so it's a young site but I am on page 1 for most of my main keywords and on page 2 for the rest. As a local real estate site competing for ranking against the national brands do you think it's worth it? What else should I be doing to be competitive? Thanks again.

[opri]

I did pay the $300 for couple of my clients and I did not see any improvement on google serp , however  about 15% more traffic from Yahoo was the single improvement.

[lethal0r]

realistically, your $300 might get you a single place higher on G, but it might not. dont know what kind of search volume you get, but how many conversions would it take for it to be worth spending the money? unless you're in the top three, in my experience, an extra place gets you a very small number of extra visitors.

[oneseocompany]

In my experience it does not benefit much. You are better off investing $300 into 3-4 quality directories. Take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/directories

[holylandjewelers]

From an SEO standpoint is the link from Yahoo Directory the same as a link from anywhere else with the *.yahoo.com domain or does being in the directory itself specifically give you a boost from search engines?