My Yahoo Directory listing isn't being indexed by Google - what do to?

[dusanb]

I couldn't find this elsewhere in Q&A...so here goes.

I recently (a couple of months back) shelled out $300 for a Yahoo Directory listing. My site got included, but my PageRank didn't budge. Figuring it may take a while, I kept on checking Google's index for the link - still nothing.

Now it seems as if some Yahoo & other directory categories are excluded from the Google Index, rendering the links useless from a PR point of view.

Anything I can do about this? I've heard of suggestions like linking to the specific page of the category where I'm listed, in the hope Google will crawl and re-index, but I don't know. Any thoughts / suggestions?

BTW the directory category link is: http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communications_and_Networking/Telecommunications/Wireless/Software.

Thanks in advance...

[dusanb]

Thanks Jane, Alec, for the great answers. I'll concentrate on SERP more than PR from now on. And avoid directories!

[JaneCopland]

Hi Dusan,

I'm in agreement with Alex here - there is plenty of reason why Google would pay little attention to many web directories, but the primary reason today is going to be a lack of good content. After Panda, pages are being held to a higher standard for the quality of their content, and web directories rarely include any original content at all.

For SEO purposes, being linked to from old fashioned directories isn't a bad thing, and could either be of minimal help, or a little bit helpful. However, it's not a link building tactic that you can really rely on anymore.

The PageRank advice is true too: at best, toolbar PR is a good indication as to whether there's something really wrong with your site (i.e. you lose your toolbar PR overnight, or it drops from very high to very low). At worst, it's misleading and outdated, and no indication of how well you can rank.

Cheers,

Jane

[AlecPR]

I don't have any insight into this, but am interested what people in the know think...

Google not indexing Yahoo Directory listings makes 100% sense to me - they don't like taking signals from paid links, Yahoo directory is one of the biggest paid-only link directories. It wouldn't take many manual reviews for Google to entirely devalue every Yahoo Directory listing.

Also, I don't think you should be worrying about your PR all that much - part of the reason it's updated so infrequently is because the big G doesn't want webmasters to obsess over their pageranks... SERP rankings however, are updated as often as they need to be, and so are a far better measure of your SEO success.