TechCrunch reported a new finding where “Yahoo Experiments With Non-Yahoo Links On Home Page. This comes a big surprise as big Internet players like Yahoo!, MSN, AOL “do not place links on their home page that go anywhere except deeper into the properties.” Yahoo! Is the first to do a turn on the position of testing foreign links on their homepage.

The findings came to light when Webmasters received mail asking from Yahoo! Informing them about their new venture in posting other links on their Website. The change in stance, according to Yahoo! is "The goal, they say, is to make Yahoo.com as relevant as possible to their. By linking to outside websites, their hope is that the relevance (perceived or actual) of the Yahoo portal will increase." Search Engine Journal adds, “They (Yahoo!) will analyze the data and user feedback to decide if they will make this linking to 3rd party websites from prominent homepage spots a general Yahoo! policy and continue to do so in the future or not.” at” some of their larger and loyal publishers… and it helps the publishers grow their sites, encouraging increased YPN impressions, etc."

Jason Alba writes, "This is HUGE - a few months ago my website was mentioned in an article that was on the front page of Yahoo for just 3 hours. Viewers had to pick that article (out of 6 others in that main section), read the article, see that the mention to JibberJobber was #4 of a 10-point list, click on JibberJobber, and choose to sign up if they wanted to. There were about 300 people that went this far, and about 2,000 people that got to my page during this three hours (over 10% conversion). It amazed me that Yahoo had this kind of traffic. I found the traffic to be totally different than Digg traffic, too. This was on a Yahoo Finance article, and related to careers, which I’m guessing is a totally different demographic than what Digg (or even TechCrunch) gets. Based on my experience, I would love ANY ink on yahoo’s front page anytime! And this news, to me, is HUGE because it means that it is likely that a very smart, intriguing, controversial (or whatever) blog post could end up there, whereas before it was only a dream."

Internet Evangelist sums it all up saying, "If it is added traffic to the linked sites, what’s in it for Yahoo? It sure must be beyond relevance to Y!’s users. Any guesses?". Many feel, the presence of outside links on Yahoo' homepage "would be a great tool to “treat” some of their larger and loyal publishers… and it helps the publishers grow their sites, encouraging increased YPN impressions, etc. A user writes, "Interesting, does Yahoo! no longer want to make money? Seems like they’ll be driving people away from their network rather than bringing them in."

It is also unknown how the sites for testing were selected, whether it was a random pick or underwent certain specifications. Not too far behind, the latest version of Google universal search interface also had some space for extra links.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!