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Search Engine Tip:
Getting Listed With Yahoo
by Christine Churchill
Keynote NetMechanic
Our search engine submission service, Search Engine Starter allows you to submit your site to your choice of 100 search engines. So why don't we submit to Yahoo?
Yahoo is the most popular portal around. In Web site traffic statistics, Yahoo routinely comes up as one of the top referring sites. That's the good news. The bad news is that Yahoo is different from the other search engines in some very important ways that make it hard to get your site listed.
Yahoo isn't really a search engine - it's a Web directory. That is to say, it's a hierarchical set of Web site categories compiled by humans. A real live human reviews every submission to Yahoo. That's different from search engines like AltaVista or Google, where your site is automatically spidered, indexed, and added to their search database without any human involvement.
While that may make Yahoo a better directory, it also makes it very, very hard to get listed with them.
Why? First, Yahoo's submission process is fundamentally different from that used by other search engines. Unlike most search engines, Yahoo has no one place where you can submit your Web site. Instead, Yahoo wants you to visit their site, find the category under which you think your site belongs, and then submit your site at the bottom of that category's page. That way your submission is routed directly to the editor responsible for that category.
Since there are thousands of categories under Yahoo, this is something that's best done by you, the Webmaster. That's why we don't submit your site to Yahoo.
In addition, because humans are involved in reviewing each submission, it takes a long time to get into Yahoo's directory listing. The typical time between submission of a site and its actual listing in Yahoo is five months. And that's if your site gets listed at all.
The reason for this time lag is simple: Yahoo's editors are swamped with submissions. Since Yahoo is the most popular search engine, and one of the most popular sites on the Web, it receives thousands of submissions a day. The chances of your site getting noticed aren't good.
However, Yahoo does offer an option that can improve your chance of getting noticed - at least, if you're willing to pay for it. Yahoo Express service guarantees that your site will be reviewed within seven days of submission. The service costs $299 per submission and sites that submit after December 28, 2001 have to agree to pay a subscription fee of $299 per year after that.
Note that Yahoo Express doesn't guarantee that your site will get listed, just that it will be considered for listing. Yahoo's theory seems to be that, if you're willing to pay $299, then you probably have a higher caliber site that's worth a look.
Is Yahoo Express worth it? That depends on how important search engines are to your site promotion strategy. When you consider the time and cost spent to develop your Web site, spending $299 to promote the site is probably worth it.
Also, keep in mind that, while Yahoo is the top search engine, it isn't the only one on the Web. Our Search Engine Starter submission service can register your site with all the other big engines plus all the second and third-tier search engines. Compared to the cost of Yahoo Express, that may be a better a return on your investment.
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