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Order soma no rx, Today Matt McGee published portions of an interview he had with Yahoo's Director of Product Management, Brian Gil, in which Brian responds to our report and others of affiliate spam in Yahoo Local:

We haven’t seen what I would categorize as significant abuse issues. Goedkope soma apotheek, I’m not going to speak specifically to the hotel thing. That one is a unique case, Koop korting soma. Cheap generic soma, We have been looking into it…. We’ll take the appropriate action, Nevada NV Nev., Order soma, but my gut is telling me that it’s not nearly as suspect as what was written up.

Matt also adds, "Brian did explain that there are times when businesses want to use a unique URL in their business listing for tracking purposes, online soma, Generic soma, but this didn’t appear to be one of those cases."

First off, if we're somehow mistaken as to the relationship of these links to the hotels then we'll apologize immediately and profusely, Arkansas AR Ark.. There are circumstances in which a business would implement a unique URL for tracking, but I doubt this is the case, order soma no rx. Osta soma online,



Sticking with the assumption that these links are, in fact, Montana MT Mont., Order soma without prescription, affiliate spam, Mike Blumenthal has a nice table displaying the percentages of affiliate URLs he found for a sample of hotels in various US cities, generic soma. District of Columbia DC D.C., The results: 4.7% of the listings were affiliate links. Yahoo may not deem this percentage of affiliate spam as "significant", købe soma, Wisconsin WI Wis., however, I'm sure owners of those spammed listings feel differently.

Building on Mike's table, kjøpe soma online, Indiana IN Ind., we dug deeper into one random mid-sized city: Lexington, Kentucky.

In performing a search on Yahoo Local for "hotel" in "Lexington, ordering soma online, Cheap soma, KY" we found the following:

• 141 total results


• 86 hotels are in the city of Lexington


• 17.4% (15 of 86) of the Lexington hotels are victims of affiliate spam


• The 15 listings spanned seven major hotel chains: Marriott, InterContinental, South Carolina SC S.C., Soma online cheap, Carlson, Best Western, order soma online legally, Wyoming WY Wyo., Choice, Starwood and Radisson


• All of the chains partner with CJ with the exception of Carlson and Radison who partner with LinkShare


• 31.8% (14 of 44) of the Lexington hotels with a star rating of 3.5 or above are victims of affiliate spam

Obviously this is an incredibly small sample and we wouldn't dare to quote an affiliate spam percentage as high as 17.4% accross the hotel listings on Yahoo Local, soma kopen, Soma generic, but it does give insight on the havoc that affiliate spam can wreak on a market. Yahoo Local's spam for Lexington covers seven hotel chains, nearly a dozen brands and involves two separate affiliate marketing companies.

Due to the nature of local affiliate spam, I would think that hospitality is the most victimized industry, but unless action is taken immediately, it certainly won't be the only one.

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Last week we wrote how Yahoo Local was full of affiliate spam (additional information can be found on Search Engine Land and Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search παραγγείλετε online soma, . Until recently, Comprar soma, they were the only Local of the big three to allow any user to edit listing information without verification.

This morning, I stumbled across two articles by Techdirt and TechCrunch praising the move by Google to open up wiki style editing to the maps. While I generally agree that this is a cool feature, Osta soma, there are some hard lessons to be learned from Yahoo. Soma no prescription, Some of the comments on these stories talk about the opportunities for "vandals" to mess with the listings, but they miss the real problem. Local affiliate spam involves editing links to include an affiliate code, buy soma no rx, so even though the link still lands users on the same page, Soma, all actions taken by those visitors are credited to the affiliate.Affiliate spammers aren't one-off angry people or kids goofing off, they have a direct financial interest in changing as many listings as possible, they will keep coming back again and again, soma sale, and they usually send the traffic to the correct end result, New York NY N.Y., so most users don't even notice the difference.

This last point is something that severely weakens the power of wiki style collaboration. The average user, the guy that would notice and fix a link pointing somewhere completely inappropriate, probably won't know that this is an affiliate link, and once they land on the correct page, probably won't think much of the odd link url.

One thing Google does right is allowing business owners to verify by phone or mail, blocking out user edits upon verification, παραγγείλετε online soma. A quick search on Google appears to show that the verified (and Google generated) results come up by default and the user generated content is one of the extra options. Soma online kaufen, This extra layer is great, sort of a "user be warned".

In the couple searches I did, Buy soma overnight delivery, I didn't find any of the the Commission Junction or Converseon redirects used to spam Yahoo. For now, they appear to be resigned to the "user generated" category, soma prices, but they are there and if Google isn't careful about how they integrate these results, bad things may be on the way.

An interesting point about this screenshot: all of the Yahoo results we were looking at used the affiliate #2005797, in the Google results, billig kaufen soma, it appears to be much more varied. Buy soma no rx, Almost as if #2005797 was testing the waters and decided it wasn't worth going all out just yet.

As Cavan mentioned in the Yahoo post, the more insidious results are when Yahoo displays the map results in a regular web search (and hides the affiliate link behind "official website"). παραγγείλετε online soma, I can't find any instance of this happening on Google yet, but as but as the local results are being pulled more often into regular searches, it seems like it is only a matter of time. I can't imagine Google implementing this feature and not linking it up to other services.

A Strange Occurrence

As an aside to the main story, cheap soma bars, during my searches, Acquistare online soma, I noticed something really strange in New York City local searches. One of the first searches I did was for marriott, in New York, NY.

uppereast.com appears to be nothing more than a crappy city guide website linked to an ian affiliate program, Nevada NV Nev.. A quick whois confirms that they are not Marriott owned. Kjøpe soma, The really weird part is that they are showing up as the VERIFIED owner. It didn't take long before I realized that they were showing on MOST of these listings, παραγγείλετε online soma. What happens if I do a search for that domain?

5,488 resuts!. Not just hotels, but restaurants and parking garages, it looks like they have half the city on lockdown. Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to this type of site in general, if someone can get traffic and make money from referrals, more power to them, but, in this case, it certainly seems like something more shady is happening. I would absolutely LOVE it if anyone knows how and why this happened.

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