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 a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.