Yahoo! In Two Weeks Flat!

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by Jessica Zame

First, let me assure you that this account is true. No moneys have changed hands and I am not related to, nor do I know personally, anyone associated with Yahoo! My site, Webmistress@Work, www.webmistressatwork.com was listed in Yahoo! in two weeks flat.

After reading about all the trouble everyone else was having getting in, and how a Yahoo! listing can make or break your site, I approached the task with much reverence and trepidation. I had submitted other URLs in the past without success and this time, I was determined to get in. So, as soon as my domain went live, I brewed the coffee, got comfortable and set about my mission: a listing, any listing on Yahoo!

The date was February 9, 1999. I began by reading every word of Yahoo!'s submittal directions as if they had been carved in stone. I analyzed the words, the nuances and the emphasis, every possible meaning. In addition, and more importantly in my opinion, I also read every word of their help file. I took none of this information lightly. Including the following caveat copied from Yahoo!:

" Step 2: Find the Appropriate Place in Yahoo! If you ignore anything else we tell you, please do not ignore this. Finding an appropriate category for your site is at the heart of the add process. Remember that Yahoo! Surfers evaluate each site suggested to us, and proper categorization on your part helps us process suggestions quickly. We ask that you take enough time to establish where you think your site belongs, and then make your suggestion by clicking on the "Suggest a Site" link located at the bottom of that very page. We will always make the final decision about where to place your site, but suggesting the appropriate category helps speed the process."

That sounded very important to me. My actual goal, at the start, was a category listing in "women in business". This is where the sites which I perceived to be Webmistress@Work's "peers" were listed and I wanted to be there, too. After reading the above, however, I was forced to reevaluate my site's focus. I took one more look at my home page. I realized at this point that, although my site is geared toward women in business, its real and only focus is on women in business ON THE INTERNET. My homepage at http://www.webmistressatwork.com/ contains a line that reads..."dedicated to increasing women's awareness of and presence on the World Wide Web and its vast potential for networking and ecommerce opportunities". There, in a nutshell was the focus of my entire site.

Having completed this exercise in "site soul searching", I refilled my cup and clicked on over to Yahoo!. I submitted my site to Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Women > Computers and Internet. I thoroughly expected to wait weeks or even months to be listed, if at all. I certainly wasn't getting my hopes up. Then, on February 24, 1999, two weeks after submittal, there it was in my email inbox. "Subject: Yahoo! Listing" I was shocked.

I believe I was listed on Yahoo! so quickly simply because I made it easy for them to do so. Since Yahoo! is a human edited directory and those humans are seriously overworked right now, it would be to your best advantage to make it as easy as possible for them. Try to look at your site with a fresh eye, as if you were seeing it for the first time. Ask a friend who has never seen your site to decide from your homepage what your site is about. Ask them to verbalize it in a one or two word phrase. Forget where you would "like" your site to be listed and decide where it really belongs. And once you think you have found the correct category, try to go one level deeper. If the Yahoo! editor can simply hit "okey dokey" to what you have submitted and send it on to the queue, you will be much more likely to achieve your goal quickly. It may not be your first category choice, but even a mis-categorized listing in Yahoo! may well be better than the alternative which, these days, seems to be no listing in Yahoo!, ever.