Renew Our Yahoo Directory Listing?

[christopherinc]

Our yearly renewal for the Yahoo Directory is coming up. Has anyone cancelled their renewal, and if so, did you see a drop in SEO? Not sure whether to renew this or not. Thank you for any insight.

[seomozinator]

Uhm, "drop in SEO"? How do we measure that?

I hope you meant "drop in rankings". Well, listing on a directory doesn't affect any rankings, that's for sure. And this is surely not the most important thing in SEO world to worry about. If you have concerns about your rankings dropping from removal from a single directory, you got much bigger problems, my friend

[rjonesx. 0]

It certainly could have an impact if it is one of the few backlinks you have. I would do the following...

1. In Google Analytics, check to see if you received any referral traffic from the directory over the last year. If so, you might want to keep it on those grounds alone.

2. Check in Open Site Explorer to see how many referring domains you currently have. Does the yahoo directory and sites that syndicate it represent a substantial proportion of your links? If so, you might want to hold onto it until you can build a larger, healthier link profile.

Charles is correct in that you shouldn't have to worry about a link from Yahoo (in an ideal world) because you should work to build a better link profile such that losing the directory link wouldn't have an impact.

Hope that helps!

[Toddfoster]

Hello Christopher,

As a general rule, a single directory link to your website is fairly insignificant (assuming you have a strong link profile for your website already). It is unlikely that cancelling this subscription will result in a significant rankings drop, unless it is your business' only inbound link, in which case I would strongly advise you to contact an SEO to provide you with link-building services (or you could do it yourself, there are plenty of link-building guides out there).

Here are some articles on ways you might build up a link profile:

Basic:

Beginner's Guide: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
Beginning a Link Campaign: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building/campaign
Difference between "Good" and "Bad" links: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building/metrics

Advanced:

Link-Building Tactics:  https://moz.com/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday
Link-Building Tactics: https://moz.com/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday

There are plenty of ways to provide your website with a decent link profile. I would be happy to help you put together some ideas for future SEO work revolving around your link profile. Feel free to reach out any time!

Hope this helps and best regards,

Rob