While doing some research for a client today I was finding more and more Yahoo domains and sub domains filling up the UK search results for lots of competitive queries.
This is quite a topical issue at the moment so its worth exploring exactly what these sites are playing at. Aaron Wall posted yesterday about major brands using sub domains to spam Google and fill up the search results with loads of duplicate content.
Yahoo is going a whole step further than most of the other sites. They appear to have rented out an entire sub domain to another company who has filled the sub domain with affiliate links and now enjoys great rankings in Google.
You can almost forgive pages like this as it at least still carry the Yahoo branding but the entire uk.cars.yahoo.net sub domain appears to have been rented out to an insurance affiliate site.
Worst of all Google is ranking pages like this which is a list of affiliate links that Yahoo has probably been paid to host.
Affiliate marketers have been renting pre-sell pages for a while now but I never thought they would be renting them from the second largest search engine. Obviously the affiliate has been very clever and given the chance most affiliates would do exactly the same. Yahoo has been a bit too keen to make money and is sacrificing their brand equity by pulling stunts like this but the real problem is Google blindly trusting spam sub domains.
How much do you reckon it costs to buy a Yahoo sub domain?
You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.