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.
Sticking with the assumption that these links are, in fact, 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. The results: 4.7% of the listings were affiliate links! Yahoo may not deem this percentage of affiliate spam as "significant", however, I’m sure owners of those spammed listings feel differently.
Building on Mike’s table, we dug deeper into one random mid-sized city: Lexington, Kentucky.
In performing a search on Yahoo Local for "hotel" in "Lexington, 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, Carlson, Best Western, 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, 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.