The Deversus Blog

For some time now, we’ve debated submitting our company website (http://www.deversus.com) to the web’s oldest and most popular directory, the Yahoo! Directory. Several of our clients have asked us if being included in the $299/year directory is worth the money, so we figured it’s been questioned by others as well and warrants a somewhat definitive investigation.

We submitted our website, as well as our client, Future Quest Wireless’ website (http://www.futurequest.biz) to the Yahoo! Directory on September 24, 2009. We received an e-mail from Yahoo stating that they’ve accepted both websites into the directory on October 1, 2009, although as of yet, neither website is showing up in the Yahoo! Directory search results.

We will report the amount of organic search traffic seen from Yahoo, any changes in Google PageRank, and referral traffic from the directory listings themselves for both websites over the next three months. To try and limit the number of variables and control for specific results seen from the listing in the Yahoo! Directory, we will refrain from performing any additional SEO or quests for inbound links for the duration of this study.

Why Consider Adding Your Website to the Yahoo! Directory?

What many don’t realize, is that a website’s displayed position in Google can vary significantly depending on certain conditions at the time of the search. These include whether you have Google WebHistory enabled, which geographic version of Google’s website you’re searching, or where you’re searching from. For example, on google.ca, a search for “custom software development” shows our website as the second result (at the time of this writing). However, on google.com, we’re not even in the top 100 results. Google’s search is location-aware too, so if you’re from Vancouver and search for “custom software development” on google.ca, the results shown are likely to be tailored based on your location (thus our number two spot here). A good way to check this for your own site is to visit google.com through a proxy (for example, www.proxify.com), which will hide your IP, and furthermore, your location.

To ensure your website is ranked highly for your targeted search terms across all geographic regions (and highly ranked in general), it is critical to have a high Google PageRank. There are, of course, other factors that affect your position in Google, but PR is known to be one of, if not the most important of them.

In order for us to rank well for the highly competitive search terms we target (i.e. custom software development, web application development), we felt a boost in our Google PageRank definitely wouldn’t hurt. Cheap, or free link directories (or “link farms”) are unlikely to help your Google PR and may even hinder it; obtaining high PR links to your website from pages that are relevant to the material on your site are difficult to come by and usually, expensive. Because Google’s algorithm is so heavily weighted on quality, relevant inbound links, we decided the PR 8 link alone is worth the $299/year (We’re listed at http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Computers/Software/Consulting/Custom_Programming/).

What We’re Expecting

We expect that the effects of a single inbound link are unlikely to be significant, but we will monitor incoming traffic from Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Directory, as well as our Google PR, in aim of measuring the effects our listing in the Yahoo! Directory has. We will post the results to our blog each month for the next three months.

It should also be noted that different website owners are likely to experience varying results depending on the industry, popularity of the website’s material itself (i.e. the number of searches for the targeted keywords), number of competitors, and Google PR of those competitors. A good tool for gaining some insight on keyword popularity and competition is the Google Keyword Tool.

Site Statistics Before Being Added to the Yahoo! Directory

Current Statistics for www.deversus.com (as measured by Google Analytics)

Yahoo Organic Search Results for the period of September 3, 2009 - October 3, 2009: 22 unique visits
Average Monthly Yahoo Organic Search Results since September 3, 2008: 4.75 unique visits
Google Page Rank: PR4

Current Statistics for www.futurequest.biz (as measured by Google Analytics)

Yahoo Organic Search Results for the period of September 3, 2009 - October 3, 2009: 43 unique visits
Average Monthly Yahoo Organic Search Results since September 3, 2008: 143 unique visits
Google Page Rank: PR2

So is the Yahoo! Directory worth the money? Hopefully our findings over the next three months will help answer this question to make the decision whether to add your own website to the directory easier. We will report the above results, as well as the number of referral visits from the Yahoo! Directory next month. If there are other metrics you would like to see measured and compared over the next three months, post them in the comments below.

Have you had experience with the Yahoo! Directory? What sort of results did your website see? Furthermore, are there any other directories out there, aside from the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ that you consider pivotal for achieving a high Google PR?

Update: Read our follow-up post: Is the Yahoo! Directory Worth the Money? Part 2 (One Month Later)