Yahoo.com… Taking Over the Web, One Site at a Time?

I noticed something rather interesting while checking some backlinks on a recent social media campaign.

The campaign we were working on reached Yahoo’s front page through the Buzz system.

While going through all the backlinks, I started to notice quite a few sites that were showing up as Yahoo.com.

At first I thought I had bugged my browser by opening too many windows, so I took a look at one of the site’s source code.

As I kept going through the various sites, they were all iframed to show the Yahoo.com front page.

But WHY?

Was this an old marketing plan of Yahoo’s to buy domains on the drop, and then make them show their front page to increase traffic? Where these sites included in some company acquisitions?

I guess it could just be that all these old websites just decided to call it quits, and show Yahoo’s front page for their readers… while continuing to pay for the hosting for years on end to keep doing so… but I doubt it.

Here are all the sites that I found through my checking, but there could be many more as I didn’t check until weeks after the campaign was finished.

• 123170.cn
• ectocon.org
• artgroupnewyork.cjb.net
• smipoh.cjb.net
• muslimdating.com
• ytlfw.com
• hantman.biz
• carigma.com
• kaneria.com
• perfectgrades.com
• my-domain-name05.net
• tartanheart.com
• costify.com

A look in the Way Back Machine for http://perfectgrades.com showed that some of the pages have been doing this for years.

A few Who.is look ups didn’t shed any light either, as they all seem to be owned, hosted, and registered by different people and companies.

Any thoughts or ideas? Please comment below.

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