Yahoo charging $300 for all business listings?

[PhunkyMonkey]

Although my site does show up in a search on yahoo, it wasn't in the actual directories, so I went to submit it. When I clicked on a catagory, this message came up:

Yahoo! Express
7-Day Guarantee
US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee.
Required for commercial listings but available for any site.
Guaranteed and expedited consideration of your site within 7 business days.

Does this mean that if you are a business you have to pay them $300 just for them to consider listing you??

I mean, I have definantly heard how worthwhile yahoo is, but then again I've also heard it's hard to get listed by them & I wouldn't want to blow that much money! If this is the case then I'll just keep my 'unofficial' listing, which I'm sure they pulled from another search engine.
Tiffany

[dank]

A Yahoo listing does not generate nearly the traffic it used to (at least for me), and it's harder and more expensive to get listed. If you think the listing will result in at least $300 in additional business, then it's still wortwhile. Just not the boost you might be expecting...

Yahoo's search results pull largely from the Google database, which makes a Google listing (free and easy) all the more important.

Dan

[Mandi]

So long as you've indexed yourself well with meta tags - and it looks to me as though you have - you'll do fine !

One thing you'll notice in your Stats is the ability to see what search terms folks coming in from the search engines used. Verrrrry interesting (. . . occasionally creepy, LOL!) tidbits!

[PhunkyMonkey]

Yes, I think you are right Dan... I was reading through all sorts of glowing talk about yahoo, but now that you mention it I think it was all older stuff. I searched for yahoo in the forums before I posted this & could find hardly anything from this year! Goes to show you!

Could yahoo be getting so many submissions that they need to bump up the price so much? I tried looking for a place to submit a personal page for free, just to see if I could find info, and couldn't anything. So everyone has to pay $300 just to get looked at....

(Yes, I am all meta tagged out! I did just run them through a checker though, & I think I'll rearrange the order a bit)

[Chipmunk]

It's my understanding that Google does not look at meta keywords. Several other major engines do. Most of our traffic is from Google, though I still put in the meta keywords & description, however that's mostly an artifact of being an :-) old enough site that it used to be important (most of them get automatically generated by our in-house tool). If I were starting a site now, I might not bother with meta keywords - on the other hand, it is a good practice in terms of getting you to think about the purpose and significance of each page.

Recently Yahoo added a noncommercial section (wild chipmunk pics + info) of my company's site to their directory. I had submitted it two or so years ago, but it was presumably rejected at the time. We're getting a :-) whopping two (2) whole visitors a day from that link. Your mileage could vary. Those visitors usually are among the largest sessions of the day, but again, that's specific to their & our profiles. Try to think thru the type of visitors you're trying to attract, and figure out how they would look for a site like yours.

$300 isn't unreasonable, given the amount of time Yahoo appears to take to evaluate a site.

Even though it's been a couple of years, I still remember looking at the Yahoo reviewer's session in our web access logs. He/she spent close to an hour visiting most of the pic pages, then checked out the rest of the site. I assume we were rejected at the time due to an :-\ obscure page that I considered calling the "dishonorable roadkill page" (yes, a vent page). It has both a Content Rating tag AND a warning "tunnel" page into it, but most surfers don't read, so I wasn't surprised that the Yahoo reviewer's visit ended abruptly there, :-\ possibly in horror. Within a few days I moved the picture page into a password protected directory, and added the username & password to the tunnel page. That was a far better way to handle that issue (definitely blocks an unsupervised preliterate child), since even though the actual pictures aren't gory (the poor munkling looks like he/she's asleep), it could still traumatize a careless clicker, so I :-) benefited from Yahoo's apparent rejection.

I've been thinking of submitting to DMOZ, but we're at a comfortable bandwidth usage now, and I figure anyone who really :-) needs to find our noncommercial content does, so I'm not worried. All of our commercial customers are obtained thru direct referrals and contacts, so I've never spent a moment on that part of the site, and don't plan to. We do medium to large scale software development, so it would only be a waste of our time to try to solicit suitable clients over the web (we'd be far more likely to get lots of frivolous requests-for-quotes).