A sign of Yahoo’s desperation: Redirects
May 29th, 2008Has anyone else noticed this lately: Whenever I click the bookmark for my Yahoo! Finance stock portfolio I am taken to the Yahoo! homepage instead of the correct page. This only happens the first time I click it; if I click the bookmark again, it usually goes to the correct page. I would understand if I were logged out of my account somehow but the link doesn’t redirect me to a login page. In fact, once I’m at the Yahoo! homepage I can clearly see I’m still logged in with links to my (unused) Yahoo! email inbox.
This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve noticed Yahoo! providing a poor user experience for the sake of profits and pageviews. If you’ve been following this blog for the past few years you’ll remember our complaint about the Yahoo! domains cancellation form. For more than 6 months the form, linked from our Yahoo! domains control panel, displayed a message saying the cancellation form was temporarily down for technical reasons. Inconvenient for customers who wished to cancel their domain renewals, a little too convenient for Yahoo! who continued to collect the $$ on domains that were automatically renewed.
Could this latest scheme be a ploy to inflate Yahoo! homepage pageviews by redirecting traffic from more popular Yahoo! products like Yahoo Finance? Reminds me of the trouble Apple got into recently by bundling the Safari for Windows download with iTunes updates. Forcing your customers to try out your other products is not only frustrating, it’s bad business.
