Do you have a Yahoo directory listing? Do you know that this could have a negative effect on your SERPS organic click-through rate? For the past year, we have been measuring and analyzing our listing traffic with Yahoo for our web design company. Using the search term “Web Design Ireland” on Yahoo, RedFly Studios LTD has had a relatively stable position between 1 and 3 on Yahoo! SERP. A ranking of the top three, incredible! But not everything is as wonderful as it seems…

Google specifically suggests in its webmaster guidelines:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as other industry-specific expert sites.

Anything that can help your search engine optimization efforts straight from the mouth of Google should be worth the $299 listing fee, right? Maybe for Google, but what about Yahoo? yahoo! it only allows you to submit a site to its directory using the site’s official business name. Yahoo also lists your site in their normal SERPS using this title. In this example, that is “RedFlyStudios”.

Now, putting aside all the power of anchor text (Yahoo uses redirects anyway), we’ve made a strange observation. Once our listing was approved in the Yahoo directory, all searches that return RedFly Studios in the results now show a title of just “RedFlyStudios”. Also, since that inclusion, our organic search traffic from Yahoo has dropped by more than 40%. Why would that happen? Other sites that return for the search “Web Design Ireland” show excellent descriptive titles. What would you click first? A title that describes exactly what you’re looking for, or the name of a company you may never have heard of? I know what I would click on and they’re not even paying Yahoo!

We can only assume that if all other search engines continuously provide equal or greater levels of traffic for the same search results that the same relative proportion of searches are performed on Yahoo. .

So I ask you, what is the value of ranking high in search results if people don’t click through to your website? Is it worth sacrificing traffic from one search engine for an unconfirmed boost in others? It’s up to you.