Sneaky devils! It appears as though Yahoo is sneaking in some paid ads right into the regular organic SERPs. A fellow SEO alerted me to the possibility, but I agreed that I would attempt to find a different example than the one he showed me, since I didn't want to do anything that might harm his livelihood. It only took a few minutes to come up with another example, and there are plenty more to be found as well. But I'll present this one via a screenshot I took.
The image you see below is a screenshot of the number 10 spot when searching for [ontario massage therapy]. I've overlaid the source URL of the site that Yahoo uses (screenshot of View Source), which I've highlighted to show the interesting bits. See the ads.trafficleader.com part? TrafficLeader partners with Yahoo as you can see by this page, which states "TrafficLeader's partnership with Yahoo! Search Marketing provides advertisers with access to Yahoo! Search Marketing's extensive PPC network. TrafficLeader is also a Yahoo! Search Marketing Platinum Preferred Search Submit Pro Partner, providing advertisers with direct feeds into Yahoo!, AltaVista, and AlltheWeb indices."
Now, I don't know about you, but from the image below, it seems pretty easy to add up 1 + 1 and come up with 2. If this is true, shame, shame, shame!
Just to reiterate: There are results in the organic Yahoo SERPs that contain the words "ads.trafficleader.com" in the site url, and TrafficLeader is a Yahoo partner for advertisers. It looks as though some of the ORGANIC results are really PAID ADS. Are they?
About the Author: Donna Fontenot
