Webshots.com & Seemingly Dirty Tactics or Overture Bug?

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A photographer I respect a great deal, Guy Tal, recently noticed that Webshots has stripped code from his web site and added it to image search results to create a fake sponsor link. This very deceptive and surely unethical if not illegal practice promotes Webshots search standings, while stealing eyes from Guy’s web site ScenicWild.com. Guy has assured me that he takes no part in promotional programs to advertise through Overture (which this is veiled as). I’m pretty shocked at the practice and would be curious to hear how Webshots justifies this.
More info can be found on Guy’s blog.

The link to the page in question
The Code from the page source:

Screencaptures…
Note the status bar at the bottom showing the link back to the page currently loaded. A very dirty trick.

The top of the page in question… Webshots… and the explanation is?

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Posted by Jim on 01.24.2007 at 1:46 pm
Tagged: News & Current Events, Photography

http://www.webshots.com Amy

Hi Jim,

This is Amy from Webshots. We took a look at the result you mention above. If you do a Yahoo! search result for “scenic scenic scenic”, you’ll see that scenicwild.com is the 5th listed natural search result. Webshots uses Yahoo! sponsor results on our search pages. If Yahoo! (Overture) doesn’t have a sponsored result to send, then they backfill with their natural search results.

Hope that’s helpful.

Amy, Webshots
http://www.jmg-galleries.com jim

Amy thanks for the quick follow up, but that leaves me wondering still why the link fails to go to the web site listed. Yahoo! (Overture) bug? I’ve yet to see this behavior on other sites and it still leaves the vacant sponsored ads on the page unexplained unless only the top 5 natural search results are displayed. Perhaps a question for Yahoo! (Overture)
http://www.webshots.com Amy

Hi Jim,

Ah, thank you for clarifying that point, I didn’t actually test the link. It turns out you found a bug in our code that our engineers are looking into right now. I’ll let you know when it’s fixed. Thanks for pointing it out.
http://mtj.wordpress.com Michael

Hi Jim, I’m an engineer at Webshots.

While malice makes for good headlines, the truth is much more mundane, sad to say.

Yahoo!/Overture sends back supplemental results from their web search engine when there are not enough sponsored results for a query, and these results are formatted a bit differently in the XML. (Tech details simplified.)

Unfortunately, our code was not built to handle that in all cases (read: we had a silly bug), because we’re not supposed to display general web results. The result is that if there are absolutely no sponsored results for a query, we’d show results without proper Urls, which just sends you back to the same page.

By the way, this is why “scenic scenic scenic” exhibits the problem, but not “scenic”: their ad system is more picky than their web search.

I’ve fixed this issue, and it will be live with our next code push.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com jim

Amy and Michael thanks for the quick response. I’ll be sure to amend this entry and possibly create a new one with the information relayed. Accuracy is key with such matters.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/01/25/webshotscom-overture-bug-clarification-update/ JMG-Galleries – Webshots.com & Overture Bug Clarification & Update

[...] Webshots representatives, much to their credit, have promptly addressed concerns raised about sketchy search engine optimization (SEO) practices in my earlier post “Webshots.com & Seemingly Dirty Tactics or Overture Bug?” [...]
http://www.jmg-galleries.com jim

An update to this original post has been added on the following page:
http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2007/01/25/webshotscom-overture-bug-clarification-update/