Benefit of a Yahoo! Directory Link

Found a nugget of gold in an innocent enough post on High Rankings about Google updating their webmaster guidelines:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!

The reference to Yahoo is interesting as I thought the Jump text they use would be ignored - maybe not?

That’s what I thought, at least until this comment from Erik:

The outbound links in Yahoo’s directory are cloaked; engines don’t see the long jump URL, only the direct link to the site.

More:

They do it via user agent delivery. If you go to any Yahoo directory page and roll over the outgoing links, you’ll see a long tracking URL that starts with rds.yahoo.com in your status bar.

But if you “spoof” your browser’s user agent (such as by using the PrefBar extension for Firefox or via Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer tool), you’ll see that if your UA is googlebot, slurp, or msnbot (I don’t know about the others), if you roll over the link, you’ll see only the link of the other site, not all the internal Yahoo tracking arguments.

I checked it myself using Firefox’s useful user-agent switcher and, lo and behold, Yahoo! is cloaking the outbound links from the directory.