Search Engine Roundtable, as well as several other blogs, is reporting that Yahoo Directory has lost its Google PageRank completely. Well, the main page still has a PageRank of 8 but once you start clicking past the main page, it immediately plummets from 8 to zero.

This in effect makes Yahoo Directory pages worthless.

Why has Yahoo been screwed like this by Google? Is it because you have to pay big money to be included in the Yahoo Directory and Google therefore saw the directory as paid weblinks that had to be penalized? If so, it just goes to show that not even Yahoo is immune to PageRank penalties….

But to go from 8 to zero….man, that has to sting! I’d like to see the PageRank reconsideration request that they’d have to file for THAT one.

UPDATE : when this post entered my Friendfeed feed, Matt Cutts then commented that Yahoo Directory DID have a Pagerank but only in Google’s “internal systems”. That seemed to suggest that what I - and others - had written was false. I’m sorry but I don’t see how you can argue that a ranking in an internal system is the same as a ranking in a public system, that everything is fine, goodbye and good night. To me, it’s all about public perception and publicly removing Yahoo’s PageRank from their directory sub-pages is a big deal. To say it’s all cushy in the internal system is a very flimsy counter-argument.

Websites rely on PageRank when they go looking for things like advertisers or when they are boasting about their street cred online. Imagine how embarrassing it must be for a company like Yahoo to be sitting there with a PageRank of PageRank Zero. Who cares what a private internal system says? All anyone cares about is what the public viewable system says. What it says on everyone’s Google toolbar.

Related posts:

1. My Google Pagerank has gone up!
2. Yahoo and Google - all pals together
3. First Google changes Pagerank, now they change my RSS count!
4. Knol - Google’s underhanded way of monopolising the web
5. If Google PageRank could sing…