Yahoo! Can’t Be This Stupid … Can They?

I guess they can…

I reported back on May 6th, to my private newsletter members, that it appeared something odd was happening. Yahoo! lost more than 600,000 incoming links since the last Toolbar update, yet their PageRank increased from a 7 to an 8. Impressive as that is, it is even more impressive when you consider the number of links they lost.

But then a deeper look revealed that ALL of the sub-categories in Yahoo! has no PageRank. It was suggested that Yahoo! was finally “hording” all of their PageRank. The thought was, if Yahoo! funneled the PR back to their own pages that would be the reason their PageRank went UP despite losing all those links.

Look at this page: http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/

So where did the PageRank go? This is where it just gets ridiculous. Will you believe Yahoo! went and changed their file naming convention. What’s that you ask? Simply, change the uppercase letters to lowercase like this:

http://dir.yahoo.com/computers_and_internet/

And what do you get? Check this out:

There’s the PageRank right there! According to Matt Cutts, the naming change is just a canonical issue and Yahoo! has PageRank and things are just fine. After looking at all of my test domains which have Yahoo! listings, I would have to agree. Looking at 30 days of data, I am not seeing any loss of “authority” whatsoever.