I subsequently went on with my other typical travel hotel bid using the "familiar" bottom bidding price. I got accepted with the ebates link.

So I guess perhaps that using the link wasn't a factor. But one never knows PL's algorithm how it really calculates in the rebates situation.

One other thing: I tried ebates's MOE Money Maker download. After the installation, even for my 1G fast XP SP2 laptop, I could not deal with the sluggish performance while surfing. Keyboard inputs while using browser slow down very much. Even after the uninstall now, I still somehow feel the sluggishness!!

Besides, I was led to believe there was just gonna be "alerts" when you visit ebates partner sites. Probably the details are buried in the T&C. But now it became very clear to me of what it does: Each time when you visit a URL, it will go to ebates to check if it's a current site then retrieve the necessary append to actually modify your url to include the the appended strings from ebates. How can this not affect performance?

This is like whenever one uses a browser, the only way to go is to bring up ebates site, find the link for that particular site's link on ebates, then click on that link. Now even when you go somewhere else from that particular site, each time you have to come back to the ebates site to search if appends are available. If yes, then click on it. Lots of processing and searching, and keyboard trapping I think.

If the scenario was presented in plain English before the download and install, I wouldn't even think of trying in any way. Misleading is what it is...