Microsoft Live Search Indexing & Listing Google AdWords Ads

Raven SEO Blog spotted Microsoft’s Live Search indexing Google AdWords ads. The example given was a search on colorations paint, which returned Google AdWords ads in the 3rd and 4th position. Here is a screen capture showing one of those listings:

I checked Google, Yahoo, and Ask to see if they were indexing any Google AdWords ads, and they were not – at the time of this post. I then did a deeper check on how many Google AdWords ads Microsoft’s Live Search was indexing, and I noticed it was over 4 million!

A site:www.google.com/pagead search at Live Search will show you this for yourself. Here is a screen capture of what I see right now:

Google clearly is blocking search engines from indexing that Google directory in their robots.txt file. However, that doesn’t prevent Live from having URL-based listings that come not from crawling the links, but merely seeing them from other pages (Google does the same thing — it may list a blocked URL. Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools explains this more).

Postscript: The Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center blog has posted that they’ve identified and corrected this issue and results should return to normal shortly.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.