Yahoo! Search Result Abuse

Our unfriendly neighborhood drug spammers have moved onto something new, they are now abusing Yahoo!‘s search result URL’s. Lets have a look at how Yahoo! search results are shown.

When you do a search in Yahoo! each result displays with a tracking URL to track a users clicks on links to try and improve the relevance of search results this URL is effectively is a redirect URL. Now while you might think this is helpful and to an extent it is, it also causes a problem especially if the referral is not checked against a site.

I have received the following URL in a spam email:

http://wrs.search.yahoo.co.jp/S=2114736003/K=holesteam.com/v=2/SID=w/TID=jp0006_jp0006/l=WS1/R=1/DUI=1/QT=dqp/IPC=jp/H=0/;_ylt=A3xThlIPO5JHaQoBWT.DTwx.;_ylu=X3oDMTFqbm9mZWNuBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRxdANkcXAEc2VjA3NyBHZ0aWQDanAwMDA2X2pwMDAwNg--/SIG=119esggd9/EXP=1200852111/*-http%3A//holesteam.com/

The above URL is the top result for a search on holesteam.com, this domain is the spammers domain.

One thought on “Yahoo! Search Result Abuse

  1. Pingback: Yahoo! Redirect Abuse « Web White Noise

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