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. I’m not going to speak specifically to the hotel thing. That one is a unique case. We have been looking into it…. We’ll take the appropriate action, 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, 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. There are circumstances in which a business would implement a unique URL for tracking, but I doubt this is the case.
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