Google News May Index Yahoo Ads

Sep 25, 2007 at 8:44am ET by Barry Schwartz

BlogStorm has found that Google News might actually index Yahoo contextual ads.

For example, a search on Loans4 in Google News returns an article from InTheNews.co.uk. Let’s look carefully at the snippet in Google News:

As you can see, the text reads:

If you are a homeowner, visit the Loans4 website to see which loan you qualify for. Compare over 30 insurers to find the cheapest car insurance quote. …

Now, go to the InTheNews.co.uk article and try to find that content in the main article. You can’t. But you can find it in one of the ads on the lower right part of the page. Here is a picture of that:

That’s a Yahoo ad, and if you review the code, you can see the content is visible in the HTML. So technically, there is no reason why a spider won’t index that text.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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solarian said " Your article would be more consistent if you provide some links to not optimized for search engines "
KevinSpence said " The AP & other news companies forget how much of their content is syndicated. So alright, maybe "
Avintrue said " So I would have to say that principle of pointing a finger with three pointing back at you is a good"

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