For the first time in their existence, Yahoo! (YHOO) is opening up its home page to link to other sites. Understanding the addition of links can bring even more traffic to the site, the company is pursuing the new strategy.
The new home page is now operating, launching on Thursday, and doesn't look a lot different other than the center section which includes the new links. Editors at the company make the decision on whether to include a link or not.
While any site can be linked to by Yahoo, they are taking steps to avoid overloading smaller sites with traffic, by not putting them up as a major story, but more likely as related links instead.
Tapan Bhat, vice president of front doors at Yahoo, said concerning the inclusion of outside links: "We are the only one of the old portals to do that. We are linking to the best stuff around the Web."
Of course if Yahoo! starts getting even more traffic, we'll see the other portals adopt this as well.
It reinforces the counterintuitive practice of sending links other places ends up drawing more traffic to the source of the links: in this case Yahoo.
This is all centered around Yahoo's strategy, recently communicated by founder and CEO Jerry Yang, which focuses on making Yahoo the starting place for consumers on the Internet.
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