AuctionBytes: Battle for Eyeballs Drives Google Traffic to eBay
AuctionBytes: Google Shuts Off Participant in eBay Affiliate Pilot Program
AuctionBytes: Are eBay Affiliates Spamming Google with Your Words?

Legions of eBay affiliates are creating garbage web pages in an attempt to get high Google listings placements that will then drive traffic to the auction site. While most sites do not use javascript redirects to cloak pages and immediately redirect traffic to eBay affiliate links, several top affiliates do.

The phenomenon is not unique to eBay. All companies using affiliate marketing have provided incentives to engage in "search spam." If the high ranking page isn't cloaked by javascript, yet doesn't contain valuable content is it spam? That is a question Google's engineers will answer, and abusive affiliates may find the answer comes in the form of banned domains.

A Commission Junction representative is quoted in the article as saying that eBay permits redirects on search engine results. I believe the spokesperson was referring to the AdWords listings, where affiliates attempt to arbitrage keywords and make money off of a spread between what it costs them to advertise and what eBay will pay out.