Day 11 (or is it 12?): Yahoo! Ya-who?
While I’m still thrilled to be close to the top of my Yahoo SERP, Yahoo’s directory has left my shaking my head. Once the way to navigate the Net, Yahoo’s directory has been virtually obsolete for years—for everyone but SEOs, who insist that a Yahoo listing is a sure way to bump up your rank, in part because Google uses the directory to help gauge a site’s authority. I have no idea whether this is true, or if it’s just one of those pieces of SEO lore that has become accepted because nobody’s able to definitively disprove it. If it is true, Google may be the only entity that still places any real stock in the once-great index. Case in point: the directory page that comes up when you search for (of course) Perton. One would expect the index to put sites like the village’s home page at the top, since it has a valid listing under the name Perton. Instead, the top listing is for Find a Church, a U.K. site listing 30,000 churches, one of which just happens to be in Perton. In second place is a PR firm run by someone named Jon Oliver, which is one town over from the village, and in third is an article about Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which has nothing to do with Perton—except for the fact that it’s written by my Uncle Marvin, that is. The rest of the first page is a similar hodgepodge; it includes a Wikipedia article about HD DVD (its tenuous connection: a link to an Engadget post by me in a footnote), another one of Uncle Marvin’s articles about Mexico, and a driving school with about a hundred locations in the U.K., including one in Perton. In short, instead of a definitive index of the most relevant human-curated pages related to the term Perton, it’s a random mix of sites that happen to have a peripheral relationship to the term, most of which wouldn’t make it into the first five pages of a related Google search. Yahoo’s index really was once the best way to search the Net; from 1994, when it was on a student server at Stanford, through about 1996, when AltaVista really hit its stride, I used it daily. But until this week, when I checked it as part of this project, I hadn’t used it in at least 10 years. I suspect I won’t be using it again anytime soon.
