In late September, Yahoo reported that it would be shutting down one of the most well-known and respected directories on the web, the Yahoo business directory. A few days before the end of 2014, on December 26th, Yahoo did as it said and shut it down, or so many people reporting it thought.
In actuality, Yahoo moved the directory to its new home, business.yahoo.com, a sub-domain within the Yahoo.com website. Many people reported that navigation in the newly created business.yahoo.com was broken, but it was fixed a few days ago. It also contains many of the old listings that were in the Yahoo business directory. However, the same error issues are happening again, so we will see if Yahoo alleviates these issues.
The real question is ‘How do I get my website listed in the newly created business.yahoo.com listing?’ There is no answer to this question yet, but there are several other trusted directories out there that you can use to help drive traffic to your site.
DMOZ: Also known as the Open Directory Project, DMOZ is the so-called ‘largest directory of the Web’. It’s VERY difficult to get listed in DMOZ, and if you do, GOOD FOR YOU! Additionally, the only true DMOZ is on the .org TLD; if you find links from DMOZ.cat or DMOZ.by, these websites scraped DMOZ.org and duplicated the listings for their own purposes.
UPDATE – DMOZ HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN. 🙁
BOTW: Best of the Web Directory lists high-quality, responsive websites that are categorized by topic and region. This is a paid directory, as you have a choice of either a one-time fee or an annually recurring fee for a BOTW editor to manually review the site for inclusion into their directory.
JoeAnt: Another human-edited directory, however, JoeAnt was created by a handful of former Go.com (Disney) volunteer Go Guides. It has a similar layout to DMOZ, however, at the top it has a ‘best blog’ and a ‘best website’ of the month listed to feature various websites the editors find the most helpful.
There are several other trusted directories, but these are three of the biggest. If you run across any directories with the terminology ‘SEO-friendly’, run the opposite direction. These websites were useful and effective in the past, but do more harm than good in the modern Internet landscape.
UPDATE: December 21st, 2015
The Yahoo Business Directory has finally been properly reincarnated at its new home, AabacoSmallBusiness.com. A screenshot of Yahoo’s new home can be seen below. They offer an easy way to transfer existing Yahoo Small Business owners to sign-up for Aabaco’s new service (which is, in essence, the same as the Yahoo Business Directory).
UPDATE: June 28th, 2017
Yahoo Business sub-domain (business.yahoo.com) is no longer active. The link goes to a page that reads as below:
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