Is Yahoo Directory still worth it?

Now Bing is powering Yahoo’s search results, anyone tracking their search engine positions across both engines will have see their Yahoo rankings move into line with their Bing ranking

In a particular case of a client with a paid Yahoo Directory listing, the Yahoo rankings have dropped from a probably unrealistic first place all the way down to 21. Theoretically the directory listing didn’t affect the organic placement but that’s pretty hard to believe on the basis of this evidence.

This leads me to question the value of a Yahoo directory listing. The listing in the directory itself has brought just 3 visits so far this year, indicating that no humans are using the directory. As for that top ranking, there wasn’t much organic traffic coming from Yahoo anyway (less than 10% of the traffic that came from Google).

A Yahoo Directory listing costs $299 a year, so now it’s just down to gut feeling on whether a known paid link from it still carries any value in the other search engines’ algorithms. Google no longer suggest getting listed there on their webmaster advice pages. Is this an indication that it’s time to cut that expense and spend the money on something more trackable and productive?

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Back to School

A few weeks ago I sat an exam for the first time in many years. It was the online certification test for Inbound Marketing University, a project driven by Hubspot, providers of a web based software solution that is designed to assist SMEs with, well, inbound marketing. The ‘professors’ of Inbound Marketing are all high level practitioners in their relative fields – it reads like a who’s who of ‘new marketing’ types.

What’s Inbound Marketing anyway?

Inbound Marketing is the antithesis of many elements of traditional marketing – it’s about creating relationships and establishing a presence, making potential customers aware of you in a more natural way than interruptive tactics like TV advertising.

Course overview

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Why Twitter needs to take credit for links

So Twitter are spending time amping up the retweeting functionality on the site and in the API. All well and good but that’s not really going to make a huge difference.

Here’s an idea that will benefit both Twitter and webmasters the world over

If you use Twitter via the web interface and click a link in a tweet, most URL shorteners (which is how most links are presented in tweets) correctly pass the referrer value in the format ‘twitter.com/username/’ or if from an individual tweet: ‘twitter.com/username/status/tweetid/’.

If you’re using a third party Twitter client and you click on a link, no referrer information is sent with that to the site you visit. In terms of analytics, that information is lost, so that traffic is presented as direct traffic.

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