via non-search engine friendly redirects like:
[us.rd.yahoo.com...]
Please correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't Google following all the redirects until it finds the final destination? So example.com/1/ which redirects to example.com/2/ which redirect to example.com/3/ has the same effect as example.com/1/ redirecting to example.com/3/

It looks like it's just a matter of canonicalizing upper vs. lowercase as to why some of the subdirectories look the way they do in the toolbar. I just wanted to reiterate that the Yahoo Directory has plenty of PageRank in our internal systems.

If you are trying just to boost your Pagerank I wouldn't bother. If you want to pay the $300.00 fee you can submit your website and you will get considered for a link on a trusted well known directory. Pagerank changes all the time it can go up and down.

Trust is trust, and if submitting to the Yahoo dir gets you trust, in this day and age, its a no brainer as far as I am concerned.

Trust is trust, and if submitting to the Yahoo dir gets you trust, in this day and age, its a no brainer as far as I am concerned.

Submitting doesn't necessarily suffice. They need to accept your submission.

So what's the final consensus with this? Do people think that these Yahoo directory pages still have PageRank like Matt Cutts is saying? Did Google really do this on purpose?

Its not hard to imagine why Google might see this as an opportunity to do two things:

1. Shut down a simple way for webmasters to gain PR for their site

2. Shut down a source of revenue for their # 1 competitor. If people knew there was no PR gain from the directory, many may decide its not worth to pay since the directory gets so little traffic.

Perhaps Google decided to do this but is disguising it as a URL concat problem or whatever... I can imagine that they wouldn't want to let everyone know the real reasons above... so Cutts is towing the line.

Or... maybe Cutts is telling the truth and this is all just a misunderstanding.

Personally, I am finding it hard to look past the financial gain and the SEO smashing gains that Google gets from doing this. Always follow the money trail.

botw.org pr is still alive and well. Same format: paid submission and human reviewed. I'm not jumping on this no pr for Y! dir link bandwagon just yet.

...but then again, I'm not going to buy a link from the Y! dir again until I know for sure :)

Seeing PR8 on dir.yahoo.com

Johnnie,

Correct, but the issue is the PR on the SUB-Pages - where your site would actually be listed, those are all showing no PageRank.

hidef - Paranoid, I say. I think Google's stance on SEO is if you have good, relevant content then it doesn't matter. If you follow standard, non-blackhat SEO methods you should do fine. A human reviewed directory is a good source of trustworthy sites; Yahoo! may have its issues, but it's not worth discrediting a site where most of the crap is already filtered ;)

canonicalizing upper vs. lowercase

I've had the same issue in my directory. Matt, is there something we need to change in the URL structures?

There is no PR in Google toolbar if viewing for example:

dir.yahoo.com/Example/Example/Example

However, if capital letters of the URL are changed to lower case letters, the Google Toolbar does show PageRank:

dir.yahoo.com/example/example/example

My question is: Did Yahoo recently change the URLs to capital letters, or is this just a Google issue which will likely resolves itself in a while?

[edited by: Marvin_Hlavac at 3:59 pm (utc) on June 11, 2008]

However, if capital letters of the URL are changed to lower case letters, the Google Toolbar does show PageRank:

Yikes! Is that a major oversight on Yahoo!'s part or what? What were they thinking? Had it always been that way? I don't think so.

Using Pascal Casing in file names along with underscores for separation just adds more challenges into the mix if you ask me. Both of those practices have been known to cause issues. If you are using Pascal Casing in file names, expect to "always" have challenges as there will be links to you in both lower and upper case. If you don't have the rule in place to force the proper case, you are going to have all sorts of challenges with your indexing routines and visible PR, mainly the splitting.

Another issue that has come out of this are cache dates in the Yahoo! directory. Many categories do not have cache dates. This is even true of main categories such as:

[d2.dir.ac2.yahoo.com...]

I am hoping Matt Cutts can chime in here to explain this. I have checked the lower case version of URL and verified there is no "nocache" tag.

I believe Matt in that this issue just needs to be worked out inside Yahoo. Both Yahoo and Google are still working on various projects together, and it doesn't makes sense to me that G would penalize them.

[webmasterworld.com ]

Whether it makes sense or not makes no difference, the issue continues, Yahoo!'s directory isn't being cached in Google and that is serious in my book. PageRank isn't much of a factor for me, but the cache date is.

Question: Why isn't the Yahoo! Directory getting spidered by Google?

As long as the url is still found in google it is good.

Hi Matt,

How much is Y! paying you ;-) Jj, I know you get your paychecks from G. Thanks for letting us know!