Yahoo local is a very important local search property. However, it has one fatal flaw - hijacking other people’s business listings. (Full Yahoo local review here).

Because it’s so easy to take control of a listing, you must be careful that it remains in your hands. If you pay yahoo $10/month, then the listing always stays in your account and you receive the benefits of an enhanced listing. If you don’t pay Yahoo - then anyone else can come along and hijack that listing putting it in their own Yahoo account.

The last time I checked, MSN, Google, and Yahoo were all available for Hijacking. Their is no QCing of this hijacking procedure. What happens is the listing is now in two different Yahoo accounts, and the last modified data is the one that shows on a Yahoo search.

To hijack a listing, all you have to do is click the [check this info] ‘is this your listing’, log into your account, fill out a little bit of data, and then it’s all yours.

When I first saw this, I was amazed at how easy it was. Then I started thinking about the real implications of doing this well.

1. Only change the phone number in a listing. This will make the listing and reviews rank naturally for the previous business, but phone calls generated form the review would be yours.

2. Hijack listings with many positive reviews. The reviews stay with the listing. Therefore, you could change all the business information around but keep someone else’s reviews. This would be a great way to jump start a Yahoo listing.

3. Link stealing. Google crawls Yahoo local and counts them as backlinks. If you were to start changing only the URL in the listing, it may go undetected for a awhile and bring better Google rankings.

4. Because you feel like having MSN, Google, and Yahoo in your Yahoo profile. Be all these companies at once for a day. The last time I checked, all these listings were open to hijacking. It’s pretty amazing that Yahoo didn’t enhance their own listing.

I’m sure there are much more insidious things todo with hijacked listings. I’m not pointing this as a how-to on hijacking. I’d rather see Yahoo put some QC behind their local listings besides just paying $10/month to see what happens. Right now, I can steal MSN, pay the $10/month, and an MSN employee couldn’t even change the info.

The success of local information websites rides heavily on data quality and integrity.

Yahoo has a lot of data. Its still working on the quality.

• Hijacking Google Local Listings
• Yahoo Local - Controlling and Protecting Your Data
• Yahoo gives away free websites
• Google Local - Create Your Own Listings
• Yahoo to Change Look of Search Results