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Dave's Notes; A mate of mine, Andy, went on a bit of a rant today and I felt I just had to post it.. as is… Yahoo are fraudulent bastards - No really, they are.
Sorry if I offend anyone with this rant, but be warned, I'm very very annoyed about this. Has anyone seen this Digg story about; Yahoo setting affiliate cookies in natural search results? It is based on the post from WageRank article Yahoo is dropping affiliate cookies. SNIPPET- “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.”
 So, they are, are they?
I didn’t believe it until I did it my own self. And ya know what? They do, the sneaky bastards. I looked into this a bit more, did a bit of testing and you should see the litter they drop on your machine. What’s more, that article only mentions that one "Orbitz" link. All of Yahoo's 'natural' search redirection goes through rds.yahoo.com. At the end of the URL string you can see where rds.yahoo.com redirects you too. It's supposed to be the URL of the result. View the source of this SERP, (mentioned in the article); http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=cheap+flights&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&vc=&fp_ip=UK – Now copy it all to an editor, strip out everything except the search results and you'll see the extent of Yahoo's treachery.
Black hearted Devils!
I count 16 links that redirect through rdre1.yahoo.com. Every result with a "Quick Links" in the description has an affiliate redirect link for the result title and the same for the quick links, that's 4 out of 10 results; 28 links in 10 "natural" results (inc cache), 18 of which are affiliate links and that's more than 60% of the links.
Cheeky feckers!!
And there is no cache or file size in those results BTW. The worst of it is, those 4 results, all set the same damn cookies: fastclick cookies, and cookies for (get this) all the other sneaky results. So if you click just one of those lies, you'll get cookies set for all 4 lies. Oh and bugger me, you should see the pop-unders!!
Do they expect us to believe that they won't be manipulating their results to ensure 1st page for these links? Natural search results, My Arse. What would the world would be like, if every search engine did this, if every result that had a potential sale had a cookie set by the greedy feckers. Imagine Google and MSN setting cookies (we know Yahoo already do)?? That's what, 85% of the worlds search traffic? Great, so where do our sales come from? Where would we be? I'd be out of a job, I know that for a start.
And, it appears they've only just got caught. How long have they been doing this? How many cookies have been set? How many of MY sales have Yahoo stolen?
Fack Yahoo, and the horse they rode in on!
/rant Note; Andy is a womping search muppet mate and affiliate addict that runs Search Engenie - I just love a good rant... so natural, so cathartic - thanks for letting me print it - ha ha ha ha :0) - ongoing discussion is here.
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