While small businesses are worried about the risks of buying or renting a few links, some large corporations are launching shadow brands or buying out competing domains.More and more Yahoo domains and sub domains are filling up the UK search results for lots of competitive queries.
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.