Two months ago Matt McGee wrote an article title, “Are Yahoo and Yelp Dating?” in which he noted that Yahoo had given a nice bit of exposure to Yelp by using one of its listings as the primary example in their Open Search announcement. At the time he had speculated that Yelp had been chosen because of a perceived relationship between the two sites, which included a keyword rich link to Yahoo Local at the bottom of every business profile page on Yelp (see below). These links had been sighted as early as December 2007 and perhaps were related to Yelp’s participation in Open Search.
Frankly, I didn’t give the relationship much thought until the other week when SEOmoz posted an article about Yahoo’s relationship with Great Schools in which a large number of the Great Schools pages linked to Yahoo Real Estate, once again, with keyword rich anchor text. Read more →