Why Are Yelp! & Yahoo! Still Spamming Google!?

Update: Matt Mcgee informs me that this is way old news.  Still interesting though.

First CityGrid and now Yahoo!?  What’s Yelp up to?

A reader from a daily deals site just asked me why Yelp was linking to Yahoo on the bottom right of this URL with the words “New York Burgers” in the anchor text.

Upon further exploration, I found similar links on every business profile page I checked.  And if you search Google, you can find millions of Yelp URLs with these links.

I then did a similar query to find Yelp links on Yahoo and found several hundred thousand (hey Yelp! you might want to give Yahoo! some tips on bot accessibility) like this one:

It’s not unusual for sites to link to other sites as additional resources for users (isn’t that what Yahoo! used to do for a living?), but seems like more than just a coincidence that they both are only linking to each other and they are using perfectly targeted anchor text in the links.

If I didn’t know better I would swear that Yelp! and Yahoo! are participating in what Google would call a “link scheme”:

Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Now I don’t want to suggest that Yelp! & Yahoo! are trying to manipulate PageRank and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not either of them is linking to a bad neighborhood, but these links certainly seem excessive.

Hey Matt Cutts, how about a ruling on this one?