Affiliate Stealing Your Organic Referrals on Yahoo?

I recently encountered this sneaky little affiliate trick using Yahoo SSP on a site I work on that drives traffic through a number of affiliates and pays them for CPA leads. If you don’t know about it, Yahoo has a somewhat unfair program that is called “paid inclusion” or Yahoo Search Submit Pro (SSP).  The thing about Yahoo SSP, is that it’s impossible to tell by looking at the front-end of the SERP that you are looking at a paid inclusion listing.  They show up intermixed with the organic listings.  This means, if you’re not using Yahoo SSP, it’s highly likely that the page 1 real estate you’re competing for organic space on is really only 4 or 5 spaces, as opposed to the top 10.

Here’s the affiliate trick:

Sign-up for SSP with Yahoo (or one of their preferred providers).  Tell them you are an authorized agency for the website (or don’t tell them anything, as they probably won’t ask).  Then, use your affiliate ID as your destination URL in the SSP feed (same as you would with a PPC account).  Optimize your feed for your target keywords, and better yet, for the brand/domain name.  What this means is that if someone searches for the brand name of your offer, you are most likely going to rank #1 on Yahoo.   I would never recommend someone actually do this, because it’s dishonest and takes advantage of others.  If you’re an affiliate and you try this, shame, shame.

However, if you’re a website owner and you have affiliates, be very aware of your affiliate traffic sources. If it’s Yahoo, and appears to be organic, you may have a problem – that affiliate could be purposefully stealing your 100% gross-profit traffic and charging you for it.

Here’s how to tell if a listing is Yahoo SSP:

1. Look at the source code. Does the url around the link appear to have a couple of redirects?  If so, it’s probably SSP.
2. Look at the Title on the SERP. Compare it to the title on the page itself.  If they’re different, then it’s most likely that they are using SSP.  However, keep in mind the title may also be coming from the Yahoo directory listing.
3. Does the url contain an affiliate ID? This is not always an indicator of SSP, because Yahoo often grabs affiliate ids in urls and displays them in search results.  However, it might be a sign of some foul play.

Example: A search for “Acai Juice” returns Vitaminshoppe.com as the Number 1 Listing.

First, by looking at the source code, I see that there are multiple redirects (and the url string is longer than the others).  Note: if you’re using Firefox, you have to copy the code into a text editor and wrap the text, because Yahoo doesn’t have any wrap and it’s difficult to look at the code.

Also, you can see that the url it references in the redirect is http://booyahnetworks.com/ ; which upon further inspection, is a Yahoo SSP provider…

Next, take a look at the title: Acai Juice – 32 Fluid Oz | VitaminShoppe

Then, take a look at the browser bar title when you click to the site:

Different = Yahoo SSP. Now, if I was VitaminShoppe, and I paid affiliates for sending traffic to my site, I’d want to make sure that this particular agency / affiliate was actually authorized to use SSP by me; otherwise, they’d be cheating me out of free organic traffic.

Finally, you can see there is an ID appended to the url – if that affiliate doesn’t have permission to be using Yahoo SSP, they’re busted . (But keep in mind, if the first 2 checks don’t reveal SSP, this could be happening by another issue… and you should be using 301 redirects or at minimum, canonical tags, to remove IDs from your URLs to prevent this).

That’s not to say, however, that you shouldn’t use Yahoo SSP.  As much as I’m not a fan of such a sneaky manipulation of what is supposed to be the “best results” for a query, I have and do use SSP for certain websites.  If you don’t, someone else will, and it may just not be worth the competition.