Yahoo's New Submission Options

Free Submission, Yahoo Directory

Part 2

Originally Published: March, 2004

Continued From: <<< Pay-for-Performance, Site Match

Free Submission

For value-conscious marketers, there may be a silver lining relating to Yahoo's assimilation of Inktomi. Free submission may be playing a more prominent role. Over the past year or more, Inktomi has been phasing out free submissions starting with its own site and followed by its many partner sites. Only one obscure submission page on MSN remained after it was finished. During this time, Inktomi pushed their paid inclusion program almost exclusively.

With the recent changes, Yahoo has restored free submission to their main submission page. You must register your name and some other basic contact data before using it, but it is free.

Is submission even necessary with Yahoo? For most people, the answer is probably no. Do a very specific search on a unique phrase on your page to see if you appear in the index. If you were in the Inktomi index before, you will likely be in the Yahoo database today. In addition, we're seeing evidence that Yahoo is spidering the Web fairly aggressively, including billions of pages for free. They claim to index "several billion pages" now. In fact, Yahoo claims that 99% of its database is comprised of free listings. Therefore, you do not have to pay to be listed in Yahoo.

Like Google, your best strategy should be to establish third party links to your site so the search engine will find you on its own. You'll then not need to worry much about submitting except when you start a new Web site, or where Yahoo appears to be having trouble finding you. It's also a good idea to run a check periodically to make sure one or more of your pages were not lost from the index.

Yahoo Directory

Yahoo's directory listings are where it all started. At one time, these listings appeared prominently in all Yahoo search results. Therefore, when they began charging $299 per year for a site review and possible inclusion in the directory, it was worth it. Today, Yahoo visitors must opt-out of the default search and perform a directory search to find sites listed here. There's no question that people do this, but it's certainly a much smaller percentage of Yahoo's total traffic.

Therefore, inclusion in the Yahoo Directory is not as critical as it once was. However, it can still provide a link to your Web site from a reputable source. Since third-party links play a significant role on other engines, if you can spare the $299, it may still be worth the fee, particularly for less established sites. If your budget is tight, you can still submit to other directories such as Open Directory for free.

Continued From: <<< Pay-for-Performance, Site Match

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software.

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