December 5, 2001

9:52 AM

Have a business? Want its site listed on Yahoo? From this point on, you have to use Yahoo! Express, which means you have to pay $299 for them to just consider your site. Does this diminish the validity of Yahoo's listings, or is this just the inevitable result of the dot-com decline?
posted by mrbula (14 comments total)

To be clear, not all sites have to use Yahoo! Express, but after a brief survey of their site, almost all business-orientated sections require it. From a personal standpoint, with the company I work for developing hundreds of sites a year, this change has turned out to be an incredible pain in the ass.
posted by mrbula at 9:53 AM on December 5, 2001

I don't believe this diminishes the validity, considering they're just weeding out smaller businesses that can't afford $299. Lord forbid you can't find free advertising.
posted by trioperative at 9:54 AM on December 5, 2001

It's basically been like this for months if not years-- any business that submit their site had to wait such a significant time for it to be listed that the listing fee was the only de-facto listing tool. The power of Yahoo is such that they can get away with this.
posted by cell divide at 9:57 AM on December 5, 2001

Several years ago, I could get a site listed on Yahoo by submitting it for free, then immediately sending an e-mail to the advertising department asking how much it would cost to buy a banner ad for my new site. That trick no longer appears to work, though.
posted by rcade at 10:38 AM on December 5, 2001

Oh, woe is the profiteering company. Start crying when they charge individuals or when google charges for listings, but this is rather insignificant.
posted by bryanboyer at 11:10 AM on December 5, 2001

I believe it somewhat does diminish the validity of the search results. Yahoo started as a nice index of parts of the web. If you wanted to find some sites on a particular subject, Yahoo had a nice list found in nice and neat category. Today we all know that those categories are incomplete. Sure the web is huge, but it was nice to know that they had a list of sites and made an attempt to list all the sites that they could. Now, they list what people pay to submit.

Yes, I understand that the google part of the search will find sites which were spidered out. However, I think the roll of Yahoo as a web index has ended. They are just another 'portal' that will show you what they want to show you.
posted by tomplus2 at 11:12 AM on December 5, 2001

OT: Has anybody put their domain's e-mail on Yahoo? I like their offer for them to do mail service for $35/yr, and I would gladly pay but their Terms and Conditions specifically mention domain transfer, which I don't want to do. Is that there just for MX entries or what?
posted by costas at 11:39 AM on December 5, 2001

the business fee has been around for a while...and even before it was required, we still recommended it to all of our clients. Yahoo listings work pretty good...still.
posted by th3ph17 at 11:45 AM on December 5, 2001

They are just another 'portal' that will show you what they want to show you.

Isn't that the purpose of a website, period?
posted by trioperative at 11:54 AM on December 5, 2001

Apparently I'm the only one who thinks $300 can be a significant amount of money to a small company.
posted by mrbula at 11:58 AM on December 5, 2001

If your company can't afford $300, maybe they're in the wrong business.
posted by owillis at 1:06 PM on December 5, 2001

This $300 scam is less than good for all the indie and open source sites out there.

It's really easy to get listed on Yahoo! quickly, however... just know someone who works there. Took me one email and about 3 minutes.

Oh, wait. Nobody works there anymore. Nevermind...
posted by insomnia_lj at 1:17 PM on December 5, 2001

A site my company submitted was rejected because it redirects 4.x browsers that don't properly support CSS standards to a page explaining the situation and offering links to upgrade their browser. Here's part of the response we got:

The URL you submitted was not able to be reviewed today. Parts of the site were not compatible with multiple browsers. This means that your site could not be seen when viewing it using one or a number of browsers.

The Yahoo! Express Terms of Service state that in order to
be listed in the Yahoo! directory, a site must meet the following minimum criteria:

"The site must support multiple browsers and capabilities."

Message from bizex10:
"I couldn't view your site with Netscape 4.78."

The site works fine in Netscape 6.x, IE 5.x, and Opera. To me, that means it "supports multiple browsers and capabilities." Talk about a pain in the ass. I have never had to jump through so many hoops to give away $299.
posted by bk at 2:38 PM on December 5, 2001

Three short words (as part of a post of thirteen), Open Directory Project.
posted by nedrichards at 3:04 PM on December 5, 2001