Strange Bug In Bing Deep Links Shows Facebook, Craigslist As Part Of Google

Google has deep pockets and probably would be happy if Facebook, eBay and Craigslist were part of its empire … but last I checked, they’re all separate companies.

Nonetheless, links to those three sites are showing as Deep Links on Bing under the Google.com result when you search for [google].

The “Go to YouTube” link can at least be explained by the fact that Google owns YouTube; the others are clearly a bug, and one that I can’t easily explain. That exact text — “Go to Facebook,” etc. — doesn’t show up anywhere on the page or in the source code when you do navigational searches on Google for those companies, so it’s not obvious where the text is coming from.

We’ve reached out to Bing to find out how/why this is happening.

Update: This was not a bug, but a Bing test that we’ve documented in this article: A Test, Not A Bug: Bing Deep Links To Facebook, eBay, Craigslist Under Google’s Search Result.

This might be a good time to remind readers to keep an eye not only on your Google Sitelinks, but also on what Bing shows as Deep Links (its name for the same feature). Like Google, Bing offers webmasters a way to manage their Deep Links via Bing Webmaster Tools. Deep Links can be blocked and unblocked, and even given priority weighting. There’s also a way to provide feedback to Bing on individual Deep Links.

We’ll see if Google has an account at Bing’s Webmaster Tools and submits to get this fixed soon. (Actually, I’m sure Bing will take care of it internally now that we’ve let them know about the bug.)