On November 10, 2015, Yext took over the massive responsibility of handling every business’s free Yahoo Local Business Listing.
According to Yahoo:
“Yahoo is partnering with Yext to deliver an even better Local Listings experience. Your listing will still be powered on Yahoo and you’ll have the ability to claim your listing and submit the most up to date information for your business… …Free claims are extremely important to Yahoo and we want to ensure you have the ability to easily make updates to your listing. Yext has partnered with Yahoo to improve this process.” (source).
That sounds nice, but there are several problems. First of all, if you go to the Yahoo Small Business page you are sent to a confusing Aabaco owned page and when you start clicking around you end up on Luminate’s website. If you poke around long enough you will discover the page I referenced above regarding Yext. Then….
Users are unable to manage Yahoo Local Basic Listings
As an experiment I logged in to Yext. Claiming your free Local Business Listing is extremely difficult. After a few phone calls I discovered that you must navigate through the system like you are going to purchase Yext and have them “correct” all sorts of “errors” with all sorts of strange local directories, then finally, on this page there is a tiny link to claim your free listing:
Supposedly, after you register there you are supposed to get a confirmation email and a rep is supposed to call you, and then you will be able to access your small business dashboard where you can change your hours, phone number, URL, address, etc.
Unfortunately on each listing I have experimented with the email and phone call have yet to show up. I have currently been waiting 3 weeks and not a peep. I am fairly confident that there is a major problem.
Problems at Yahoo
Yahoo has been plagued with problems this year. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Small Business Hosting, and now Yahoo Local have all been changed.
Unfortunately it seems that for the moment, editing the info on these is almost impossible without paying Yext and their current asking price is $499/yr.
Is it time to Scrap Yahoo?
Yahoo promised an “an even better Local Listings experience”. That has not happened. Given the fact that Yahoo drives very, very little traffic to business websites it seems that, for now at least, you may be better off simply scrapping Yahoo.
I want to hear from you
I have yet to meet a single individual who has ever successfully managed their free Yahoo Local Business Listing via Yext.
Please let us know your experiences below.
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I was able to submit my changes to yahoo without paying yext. Thanks for the information. I have been trying to do so for some time now. I’ll see if they make the changes.
Up until now I haven’t be able to figure out how to complain about about an incomplete address and a wrong phone number. They were listing a warehouse phone number that we didn’t want publicized instead of our sales phone and they didn’t have the suite number on the address. I could not figure out how to contact yahoo without signing up for some yext plan. Thank you for the help.
Thank you for the feedback Steve, and glad this article helped.
Although.. Unfortunately I have submitted information for multiple businesses and then have not heard back from Yext and the changes did not take place at yahoo.
Please let us know how it goes and if you get access to the listings.
Thanks!
Len
I still can’t figure out how you are even asking them for the changes without paying to begin with? It doesn’t ever give me the option to submit any changes without adding an amount of money to my cart? I can’t read what you have circled in red “click here” in the article, but it isn’t an option that I see on Yext when I am selecting a package?
I think it should be illegal for any listing to claim to be a “free” listing if you have to pay Yext to correct the listing when it isn’t correct or isn’t listed at all.
Thank you,
Melissa
This is my exact same experience. I have been waiting for months for Yahoo/Yext to post my updated free listing which was supposed to take 2 weeks at the most but haven’t been successful. All I wanted to do was update my new business address and new website but I guess in this day and age of great technology Yahoo cannot handle this efficiently…
Technically it is Yext. I have a feeling they are simply not supporting anyone who doesn’t pay them $499/yr. I could be wrong, but, I have yet to find anyone who has successfully claimed their Yahoo listing via Yext.
As for Yahoo, they are taking on water fast, this is just one of the many things which went horribly wrong recently.
Len
I was able to submit the charges for the business, but the changes were not made. I was contacted the next day via email by someone attempting to sell me Yext service. The email read:
“Hi XXX,
I noticed you ran another PowerListings scan with Yext and I wanted to follow up with some additional information about what PowerListings provides. I saw that Xxxxx Xxxxxx Xxxxxx had a variety of incorrect (specifically your phone number) and missing information on our partner sites and I wanted to explain how Yext can correct all of this information and increase your exposure and consumer traffic everywhere your business needs to be. Here is a quick summary of what our company will do for you!
The first thing we do for you is correct your incorrect online listing information. Right now, you have incorrect and missing business information regarding your name, phone number, address on our partner sites like Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Mapquest, WhitePages, etc . We fix all that up and then will add you to the sites you’re not yet listed on. We do this within 48-72 hours of you signing up with us.
That’s just the first step though, the second step is to give you an enhanced listing on all of these sites. This would allow you to add Photos, YouTube videos, A direct link to your website, A Description on your business explaining all of the services you provide, hours of operation, Staff Bio’s, and a bunch of other information that will really make you stand out over the competition you have in the area. You can even put a featured message directly onto your listings, so before anyone clicks anywhere, they can see, “Call today for a free consultation” or “Most affordable rates in the area!”. You can even insert a link in the featured message and direct people to the Contact Us portion of your website! You control the content that your listings contain!”
It is obvious to me that Yahoo does not intend to correct our listing. They have posted an internal non-sales phone number that is not always going to be answered as our primary sales phone. I don’t even want the listing, but I can’t even get it deleted. I am ticked off at Yahoo. There are many businesses in the same boat
Steve, Thank you for the follow up.
This has been precisely my experience. So far I have not found a single business owner who has been able to claim their free business listing at Yext.
So far, Yahoo’s promise is a flat out lie.
I agree!
January 28, 2016 UPDATE: I have now spoken to multiple business owners and personally submitted multiple free listings with no response.
Well, I officially wasted over 20 minutes trying to get my business verified via Yext, and it failed, just like mentioned above. Oh well, nobody uses Yahoo anymore, so who cares.
Good call, I dropped hours on it!
Since Yahoo has locked out free updating of business listing information, the quality of the listings will continue to decline. This will destroy any last bit of search business or directory Yahoo has left and drive it all to Google. Consumers of data will figure this out. It is just another factor leading to Yahoo’s complete lack of relevance.
I can not get my business verified with Yext and a friend told me they quoted him $999/yr which is ridiculous because the only leverage they really have is the Yahoo listing- Google is better.
After getting frustrated with the sales funnel I finally discovered how to claim my free listing. I followed all of the steps just to discover that Yext would not get back to me or deliver the free listing. It is all a lie.
We are experiencing the same problem but in more places than just Yahoo. Yext has partnered with a number of directories and we haven’t been able to get past the Yext wall yet. A few years back we had paid Yext to update our listings. After our year with them was up and we did not renew, we found that almost all the work we had done with them was lost. Now, we are going back in and trying to do the work manually so we have more control and we keep coming up against the same big Yext “bully”!! Even more frustrating is that I haven’t heard or read of anyone who has been successful at manually claiming and updating their listings. I would love to hear from anyone who has conquered this task.
This is ridiculous! I have been trying for months to get listings corrected – and the additional issue of multiple physicians at a practice, an office move, and personnel leaving – has left our information on the internet incorrect in so many places. With no way to correct, and no one to talk to. I am not even sure that paying Yext would work (as experienced by previous poster)! It’s like the mug shot websites that scrape info from police departments and then pay you to take them down – and they keep popping up. It’s a scam – we can’t even control our OWN information so that customers have the right information.
I have a high-end designer consignment shop in San Jose, Ca. Yahoo has me as a tuxedo, vintage, thrift store. I have verified my listing but don’t know where to go from there with any edit info to correct the listing.
I know this is an old post, but it is the most informative I’ve found so far. Is there a way to just delete my listing? I’ve found two that have been auto-generated and they aren’t even correct. I would rather they just not be there. Yext told me that they don’t provide the info for the listing, but if I buy a $150/annual package then they can help me. They told me there is a possibility the “free” listing won’t actually be updated.
Thank you Stacey. It is an old one, but a good one! 🙂
I have heard that if you really yell and scream you will get access to manage your free Yahoo business listing as Yahoo promised.
Personally, I have yet to accomplish this. The amount of time it would tke me is just not worth it since not enough people use Yahoo to even worry about.
So… As far as I know, the article is still relevant, and business owners are STILL unable to manage their free Yahoo Local Business Listing.
This stinks, as these companies have taken it upon themselves to compile this information and spread it around about YOUR business, and it is completely incorrect in many cases.