I read a couple of days ago on Search Engine RoundTable that the Yahoo! directory had lost it’s page rank on internal pages and didn’t really think much of it. I figured it was just a glitch and would be straitened out rather quickly especially after reading the responses by Matt Cutts here, and in the original thread here (He’s halfway down page 1and at the top of page 2).

Matt Cutts response on Search Engine RoundTable:

The Yahoo directory does have PageRank–I see a PR8 for dir.yahoo.com on all our datacenters. I left a comment on the original WMW thread. 6/5/08

On the WebMasterWorld thread he said the following:

Looks like there’s a PR8 on dir.yahoo.com on all data centers, so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. It’s possible that Yahoo changed their linking somehow, or that there was an issue on our side with how we canonicalized a url, but I do know that the Yahoo Directory has PageRank in our internal system, so I’ll ask folks here about it. Thanks for mentioning this. - 6/5/08

and

It looks like it’s just a matter of canonicalizing upper vs. lowercase as to why some of the subdirectories look the way they do in the toolbar. I just wanted to reiterate that the Yahoo Directory has plenty of PageRank in our internal systems. - 6/6/08

I did a quick check and matt’s statement about canonicalization seems to make sense you can check it simply like this:

Let’s use Directory Goverment for this example:

The Google cache version which was last cached on 6/7/08 is http://dir.yahoo.com/government/ which has a page rank of 4 but if you go to the link used by Yahoo! which is http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/ notice with the capital “G” you have a Grey bar.

However this was first noticed on 5/4/08 with the first response from Matt being on June 5th which was 3 days ago from this writing. You would figure with the size of two companies involved a resolution would come very quickly and one of the two would fix the situation.

First of all why is Google’s cache still showing the lower case “g” instead of the capital version when it was just cached a day ago? Is the Capital “G” page passing Page Rank internally and just not showing up on the tool bar, does it matter since the lower case g still exists and has a Page Rank of 4?

Also who do you blame for scaring so many webmasters? Google after all Matt did give warnings about switching up your URL’s like this over a year ago in his Canonicalization update Post or Yahoo who really doesn’t need to play by Google’s rules.

Also, since not many webmasters would be willing to check why the page is Grey barred and just assume a penalty did Yahoo lose much money from webmasters not submitting to their directory over the last few days if they looked at the toolbar and saw no Page Rank and a $299 bill to be on it, does Yahoo care?

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