Under its new leadership, Yahoo Local has been adding paid programs and features. It has also partnered up to take paid submissions via Yext. If you’re going to make me pay, you have to give me something of value and I’ve not seen any significant impact from being listed on Yahoo Local in several years
In the meantime, support has become extremely painful for those unwilling to pay for enhanced listings at Yahoo Local. In the past, email and phone support was available to those with free listings, even if you had to wait a while for help, but that is no longer being offered.
Now, if you have a free basic listing, you must fill out a separate form for each listing that you’d like to have either removed or modified:
Yahoo Listing Removal Form
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/local/personal_info.html
Local Listings Help Form
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/local_general.html
In my opinion, this is a big step backwards for Yahoo, especially at a time when Google has so greatly improved its support for people using its free Google Places business listings, which can have a huge impact on website and foot traffic for local businesses.
One person’s perspective: Google Places support has improved immensely since Marissa Mayer left and Yahoo Local has slipped since she has taken over the helm there.
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Mary, that is sad. I used to rave about their support and used to wish google local would answer their phone like they did with their local products. Too bad.
Yes, I used to rave about their support, too. Any time support gets worse rather than better, I think it hurts everyone involved.
Ah, the Marissa Mayer touch. Could it just be a coincidence that Google’s support is getting better while Yahoo’s is starting to gather flies? Methinks not…
Google Places learned the lesson that lack of support hurts your product rather than helping it and we are all benefiting from it. I’m not sure what lessons Yahoo is learning from this move.
I’ve found Yahoo Local basic listings to be less and less friendly to use over the last several months. Server errors and “unknown errors” make it really difficult and time consuming to use. Emails to support go unanswered. It’s getting harder and harder to justify spending the time to work on Yahoo Local.
I completely agree Alyssa. I wonder how much is influenced by Yahoo Localworks http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/localworks/features/