Yahoo’s directory: some history and changes announced recently.

Today’s post comes from Search Engine Roundtable. It appears that Yahoo’s paid directory could be slowly going away. Let me provide you with a little historical perspective. In the early days of the web (I mean 10 years ago), generally there were two types of search portals.1. Directories
2. Meta-crawling search engines

Both of these have gone away and have been replaced by bot searching technologies pioneered by Google and copied by others. Yahoo originally was a directory. In the early days you could submit you web site to their directory for free. It has always been edited by humans. Once your listing was up, you had 30 days to comment about the listing to propose changes for SEO purposes and accuracy. Then about eight years ago if your site was commercial in nature you had to pay $299.00 to be listed in the directory.

About six years ago, Yahoo hired Google to be the primary provider of the search results and they made their directory a back up provider of results. Then about three years ago, Yahoo launched their own search engine and still kept their directory as a provider of secondary results.

This recent post at Search Engine Roundtable expounds on the next steps for Yahoo’s Directory. Click here to read this interesting post.