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Live Search Is Returning Google AdWords Ads In Their Natural Search Results (Updated)

SEO

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.

Live Search returns Google AdWords Results

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File under: SEO

Tell us what you think

  • http://www.brianchappell.com Brian Chappell

    I am sure http://www.discountschoolsupply.com is getting some great CTR out of that campaign!

  • http://sitening.com/blog/ Jon Henshaw

    Brian, that’s exactly what I was thinking. They’re like, “damn, I thought I ended this campaign, but I keep getting traffic!” ;)

  • ss

    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?

  • http://bad-neighborhood.com/ Michael VanDeMar

    Yet more proof that MSN completely ignores robots.txt:

    http://www.google.com/robots.txt

  • http://sitening.com/blog/ Jon Henshaw

    Michael is of course referring to this on Google’s robot.txt file:

    Disallow: /pagead/

  • http://expertseogroup.blogspot.com/ Suresh Chowhan

    great research,

    MSN bot ignores robots.txt

  • Bill Chase

    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.