I was searching for something on google and my search results pulled a lot of results that were clearly direct links to ebay auctions. Couple of questions> 1). I thought direct linking was against eBay's rules? 2) If not, how do you generate a direct link to an auction in a google search result?
1. No 2. http://affiliates.ebay.com/ns/FlexTool.htm Are you referring to AdWords, or regular results?
What you're talking about is where a click on a natural search result in Google leads directly to an ebay page rather than to the site shown in the search result This is a form of cloaking, basically the site detects the google spider and shows them a content page, and detects a hit from a google search and re-directs to an ebay page, dropping the affiliate cookie along the way. I think CJ and eBay would consider it 'misleading' and so against their TOS, although they may or may not have a specific clause against it. It is 100% against the Google guidelines, if they see it they will ban the site.