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 […]
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.
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