There has been some talk in some forums that the best way to get a top ranking in the Yahoo! Directory is to make your site more popular, and the way to do that is to get people to click on your directory listing.

Um, no.

If that was the case, then there would be a service that would click your directory listing over and over with different IPs to move up your listing. I have tested this, and clicking on your listing does absolutely nothing. More traffic, more page views does.

Yahoo! states that the criteria of ranking in their directory is their Search Technology. Of course, they don’t state exactly what the criteria is … but it seems that there is a link up with Alexa ranking and the number of unique click throughs to your site from the Yahoo! network.

I have tried to manipulate the listings and could never crack the top ten. Manipulation seems to be a waste of time – especially with the low number of referrals from the Yahoo! Directory.