Link Cloaking

HMTKSteve

Why do big name sites (Yahoo) cloak the links on their homepage?

I was on their site getting ready to click a link about some video game thing and when I moused over the link it was a Yahoo link. I figured I was safe. Nope, it went to some video game site and was blocked by my work filter.

Grr....

...

Probably various reasons why that's done. One being the option to have the customer see a page first which states that they are now leaving the Yahoo! website. Which is also stupid, just use an icon after your links to indicate links to another site. Like wikipedia. Another reason might be stupid add in a frame. Another reason might be their annoying and don't care about the customer. Can anyone think of any other reasons? Probably more than those three.

Linton

Can anyone think of any other reasons?

They are incompetent

Omnutia

Data farming, most likely.

Victor Frost

Data farming, most likely.

I would tend to agree. Nothing is more valuable to a business than data about their demographic.