Directory Title Drops My Yahoo Rankings
For a long long time one of my top sites was at number no1 on Yahoo, not a traffic driver in any sense but it’s interesting that since I submitted the site into the Yahoo Directory, the Yahoo search engine now takes the title from the Directory rather than the page title in the actual page.
The effect was to drop the web page from No1 right down to the middle of the page 2. The titles weren’t too dissimilar, a regional qualifier being the main difference.
So I pay $299 for the annual cost of the listing and the directory listing drops my yahoo search engine rankings.
What I should have done was use the meta tag below to stop Yahoo using the Yahoo Directory title.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR” />
It’ll be interesting to see the effect of this adding this tag (once I get around to it).
You can also ensure that Yahoo will not use a directory description it might have for that page.
<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR” />
Danny Sullivan also talked about Yahoo directory titles a while back.
Don’t get caught short like me, especially if Yahoo is very important to your campaign. Luckily for the site in question it’s not hugely important but it still counts.
