Say Goodbye to The Yahoo Directory

Are you familiar with the Yahoo Directory? For the SEO's and marketing experts, it's a very well know place. It's authoritative and Google could give you some juice if it sees your website listed in the directory. Yahoo and DMOZ are the two most important business directories out there and one is saying farewell.

But what is the Yahoo Directory? Back in the days, search engines didn't work like they are now. There weren't any robots to crawl your website, no 200 ranking factors and PageRank. In 1994 Google didn't even exist.

There was Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. The name wasn't very catchy, so they decided to rename it and call it Yahoo!. It didn't crawl the web, but it was (still is) a huge directory where you could enlist your website in.

Basically you had a huge library full of websites. You go there, search for the website and then you open it. Simple as that. But it wasn't very convenient, because in order for your website to exist, it needed to be listed correctly. Because there were so many new entries each day, the moderators sometimes changed the descriptions and didn't use the necessary keywords. You can imagine how uncomfortable this could get.

It worked for years, but then Google came along and it showed the users a new way of searching. It was better, faster and more relevant. Plus, it didn't need all the human work. It was only a matter of time until Yahoo Directory became obsolete. 

It's been dying for more than a decade and this year it will finally reach its end. On the 31st of December, The Yahoo Directory will be shut down.

Some marketers say they still get some traffic from there, but everyone will agree that the directory is long gone and it was all just a matter of time. It's a big part of the history of Yahoo, but everything comes to an end.

Maybe it deserves a better retirement. After all, this is the basis, the bedrock of Yahoo! It all started here and they are just shutting it down. Some say it's already down, because we can't open it. But it could be just the massive user flow right now.

Rest in Peace!