• TechCrunch, Friday, October 26, 2007 4:15 PM

At the Q3 earnings call last week, Yahoo's CEO Jerry Yang noted that the company would soon open up its homepage to third-party developers (for widgets and other apps) as well as more non-Yahoo content. It's all part of Yahoo's goal to become the main start page for a majority of people on the Web.

And now the Web giant has begun sharing the link love -- that is, users will start to see front-page links to independent blogs and media sites with "unique or exclusive content" that have no Yahoo syndication deals. According to a spokesperson, Yahoo will choose both "large and small" sites -- provided they have "sufficient traffic management capabilities."

In the TechCrunch comments, there's the discussion of what could happen to a site if it unknowingly gets picked up by the Yahoo front page (and can't handle the resulting wave of traffic). There is also some ambiguity as to how the sites get chosen, whether Yahoo will let the site owner know in advance, and even whether the link juice will result in Google dropping Yahoo's PageRank. Expect more details to come on this -- as getting included on the Yahoo front page could essentially be an SEO coup!

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »