eClick Performance Blog

We were planning on saving this post for the launch of our new site and blog in April, but Greg Sterling’s article on Search Engine Land yesterday has prompted us to change our schedule. Google recently announced that they will allow anyone to edit the local listings in Google Maps, so long as that listing has not been claimed by a business owner. Greg touched on the possible negative implications of increased community involvement and included this statement:

Hanke acknowledged that there were some risks in doing this — Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident — but he stressed the value of getting the community involved in cleaning up and improving the database.

“Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident”…although it’s not clear whether this point was made by the author or Google Director of Maps & Earth, John Hanke, (it was Greg – thanks for the clarification) it would seem unwise to use Yahoo as proof of concept. Due to Yahoo’s open edit policy, Yahoo Local appears to be systematically sprinkled with affiliate spam.  We first noticed this behavior doing research for a downtown Chicago hotel.

Primarily involving large hotel chains, you can see the ease with which an affiliate can replace direct links in Yahoo with an affiliate link in order to benefit from a hotel’s local listing. In the example below you’ll notice that a search on Yahoo Local for “Marriott hotel” that the official site for Marriott New York Financial Center shows as tkqlhce.com.

This link will eventually lead users to the appropriate page on Marriot’s Web site, but not before first being directed through a Commission Junction tracking page.

It’s possible that many users and business owners will notice these unusual links when viewing results in Yahoo Local, but where they really fly under the radar is in Yahoo’s search results featuring local listings.

In the example above, the affiliate link is disguised by Yahoo’s use of “Official Site” in the anchor text. In these cases, it seems far less likely that the affiliate links will be noticed by users or business owners, and may account for the majority of traffic for the affiliate.

We found numerous examples of this type of affiliate spam in Yahoo Local for the major hotel chains, including Marriott and Starwood, in local results for New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles. In each instance, the links went through one of a handful of CJ affiliate domains, all using the same affiliate ID.

Hilton hotel listings also seem to have the same issues, redirecting through hiltonlinks.com, which is managed by Converseon.

So, how many instances of affiliate spam are there on Yahoo Local? Tough to tell exactly, but according to Yahoo, the domain in the examples above can be found on more than 14,000 indexed pages, and that’s just for one domain.

Yahoo, like Google, also prohibits listings from being edited once they’ve been verified by the business owner, but based on the number of unverified listings in the engines, it will take more than verification to protect the credibility of their search results.

Note: This is where you want to start if you’re interested in verifying a local listing on Google and Microsoft Live. It appears that the only way to attain merchant verification through Yahoo is to advertise on Yahoo Local.

EDIT: Update to the Yahoo! Local results.