Live Search Is Returning Google AdWords Ads In Their Natural Search Results (Updated)
Update: Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at Live Search, contacted me to let me know they’ve fixed the problem. Here’s what happened, in their own words.
Live Search is offering a new way for AdWords customers to get click-throughs — their own natural SERPs. They appear to be indexing AdWords ads from Google’s own SERPs. Doing a search on Live for colorations paint (at the time of this writing) will give you AdWords ads in the third and fourth natural result. I can only assume this is unintentional and is simply a bug in their crawler. Regardless, it’s a little embarrassing.
I am sure http://www.discountschoolsupply.com is getting some great CTR out of that campaign!
Brian, that’s exactly what I was thinking. They’re like, “damn, I thought I ended this campaign, but I keep getting traffic!”
wanted to add that I’ve seen clicks coming through onto my blog, even after I stopped the campaign, at the rate of about 3% of the original traffic, which is small but not insignificant. The referrer is pagead.googlesyndication.com, but maybe it originated in a bad index like this one?
Yet more proof that MSN completely ignores robots.txt:
http://www.google.com/robots.txt
Michael is of course referring to this on Google’s robot.txt file:
Disallow: /pagead/
great research,
MSN bot ignores robots.txt
MSN is still indexing Google ads. Search for ‘maryland condos’ in MSN and find a Google ad ranked around #13 – it leads to one of the sites I work on.
[...] Live Search Is Returning Google AdWords Ads In Their Natural Search Results (Updated) [...]
[...] Tuesday Jon Henshaw blogged an interesting find: A search for the phrase “colorations paint” brought up the [...]