Direct linking to your merchant’s affiliate is back in vogue again. The lazy man’s method to making (or trying to make) a quick buck, linking directly to a merchant site from a paid ad on search engines, was disallowed by the likes of Google and Yahoo.

Well, not anymore. Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) announced last week that it will now allow publishers on its network to direct link to their merchants without the need of any landing page.

From the February 14 Commission Junction Newsletter:

“After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.”

The policy of requiring a landing page between the ad and the merchant did weed out the weak (though it encouraged the “redirectors”), but with that restriction now out of the way anyone who can create a simple three-line ad can have a decent crack at affiliate marketing.

How that affects quality scores, etc., remains to be seen, but new policy figures to make it easier for affiliate marketers to test more offers and at a much faster rate.

The net result should be an increase in bid prices and competition across the board on the YSM network. At the same time the competition on market leader may ease as PPC marketers give YSM another look.

And let’s not forget Commission Junction who no doubt pushed to get this change done, and now stands to reap the rewards (as will other AM firms) from the increased activity of their offers.