Yahoo Is Dropping Affiliate Cookies
Let me show you how Yahoo is making affiliate commissions from their organic results.
If you search on Yahoo, all of their organic results (not the sponsored links) are redirected through http://rds.yahoo.com. This is nothing new and they have been doing this for quite some time to record click metrics.
However, sometimes Yahoo gets sneaky and slips some affiliate links in those redirects. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a close look at the results for “cheap flights:”
This all looks innocuous until you view the source code. Taking a close look reveals that the #4 result that goes to Orbitz.com is redirected through more than just http://rds.yahoo.com. The URL is too long to fit in my site’s theme so I’ll just link to it here.
If you watch your browser’s HTTP headers after clicking the link you’ll notice that you aren’t taken directly to an Orbitz page after hitting http://rds.yahoo.com. Instead, your browser is redirected to a second Yahoo URL: http://rdre1.yahoo.com. Then, the browser loads a page on http://na.link.decdna.net, which is a domain owned by an internet marketing company!
If you were paying attention to your cookies, you would also notice that when you finally did land on the Orbitz domain you received a cookie that looks something like this:
AffiliateLinks=SEM|C0000×000-homepage|Orbitz|000000; domain=.orbitz.com; expires=Wednesday, 31-Oct-2007 19:16:31 GMT; path=/
So, here’s what happened: We clicked on a link in Yahoo’s organic results and we were redirected to an extra Yahoo URL which sent us to an internet marketing company, who then sent us to our destination page where an affiliate cookie is dropped in our browser.
Shame on you Yahoo!
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Someone had to do it eventually…
How is this different than what Google does?
Google doesn’t use affiliate links in their natural search results (at least, not that I’ve seen).
This is important because Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. all claim that their search results are unbiased, but Yahoo is clearly not unbiased if they are making money when you click certain results.
Yahoo has been using Paid Inclusion since 1999, and this is just an example of it. There are a handful of “trusted” providers for PI and http://www.247realmedia.com/ is one of them.
This is nothing new.
I find it surprising that:
1. Yahoo is still accepting paid placement
2. Yahoo allows you to pay for placement of a site that you don’t own (in this case 24/7 placing orbitz)
I imagine #2 could be abused very easily (think “miserable failure”)…
These guys don’t get it. Funny!
I’m the one who dugg and sphinned these, as it is a breaking news item.
You can’t hijack a page description at least my page description and make money for a third party website. Amazing, imagine google was being paid by another company to effectively steal search results. They are stealing money from www.orbitz.com.
[…] Yahoo Caught Cookie Stuffing - They again remind me why I don’t use their search. […]
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Paid inclusion has been going on for many years so this is not news. Cookie stuffing or some other form of media tracking is required to track performance. It’s not going to hurt you as a consumer or alter your affiliate commissions.
Also, the purpose of cookie stuffing is to automate simulating clicking an affiliate link - that’s not happening here.
Dose dirty rotten scoundrels!
Good post tho cdc, i’m gonna write it up at port80.syndk8.com
Of course, it’s old news now, but it’s still valuable
information for my readers.
later,
Bomps