Does Yahoo play favorites with the big boys?

Over the years I've watched the changes in how Yahoo delivers their results. When they were a pure directory, it was somewhat easy to determine where your site might rank for your desired keywords.

When they used to use Google as their search backbone, I also found it a little easier to get decent placement.

They've had their own search engine for a few years now. The results delivered for certain queries still include results from their directory, even if you do not choose their directory as your search source.

One result in particular I find very interesting. If you search for the term "Internet Marketing" at Yahoo. The top nine results are all from their directory. Most fall into these two directory categories:

"Internet Marketing and Advertising Services"

"Web and Internet Marketing and Advertising Information"

Virtually all of the web sites in the top nine reslts are major players in Internet marketing and have been on-line for a long time. If figured maybe these big players know something that I don't.

Of course, I figured I'd try to submit my site to the category, "Internet Marketing and Advertising Services" in the Yahoo directory but their $12.00 an hour person spent less than 90 seconds at my site and put my site in this category: Internet Marketing > Promotion and I don't come up in the top ten of their results page for the term Internet marketing. Not that I was really expecting to but heck, it was only $300.00 to give it a shot.

I just find it funny that virtually all of these "Internet marketing web sites" promote the concept that content is king but yet they have all resorted to paying to be in Yahoo's directory to be found under their preferred "main search term".

Questions: Why are there no small business sites coming up for that phrase if virtually all of the results are coming from the directory. Is Yahoo playing favorites or is the fact that these sites are big players with a lot of pages and content the real reason they are given high SERPs?

I surmise that it's a bit more complex than just the directory listing. Perhaps sheer number of links trumps out in Yahoo. Quite frankly, when you get links to Wiki size, it don't matter where they come from.


Having said that, show me some evidence and I"ll get on board, I love a good directory conspiracy.

No evidence but it sure seems amazing to me that all of these companies have submitted to the same two categories and they are in the top ten for that search term and the result is a directory result not a search engine result. If it were a search engine result, I won't even propose a conspiracy.

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