I saw in my webstats that someone visited looking for the benefits of the Yahoo directory. So I thought a quick post was in order!

The principal benefit is that it is considered an authoritative link. It is even in the google webmaster guidelines! Now its hard to get more authoritative than that. This type of link has clearly been sidelined from the paid links debate that is raging since Matt Cutts famous post on reporting sites that clearly sell links to test some new algo tweaks. In this debate Matt Cutts does a smart side step and claims that the yahoo fee is for human review, not the actual link!

Ok well appart from the semantics involved in that, I would argue that the really test of the value of a link from the yahoo directory is that if your willing to spend 299 for a review (come on Matt thats really poor), then your site is pretty sure not to be a MFA junk site. Anyone spending that for a link must feel really comfortable with the quality of there content.