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Yahoo Indexes Google Adwords

Posted By: simplepixel 695 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.simplepixel.com)
Category: SEO

While looking through Yahoo's index of one of our clients, I noticed something strange. Yahoo has picked up links that are ONLY used for our Google AdWords' or Business.com campaigns.

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from dannysullivan 695 days ago #

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Or the third option is that someone clicked on an ad, bookmarked the URL (if it didn't change) and so Yahoo spidered it. OK, so there are a lot of links -- and after a little checking, I couldn't spot any of these on the pages in the wild. But that's a possibility, especially since the landing pages aren't robots.txted out.

Side bonus. In researching this, I discovered the New Scientist joins the proud list of reputable companies selling paid links:

http://www.newscientist.com/contactperson.ns;jsessionid=PEDIEMOPNOJC?recipient=linkad

from TimDineen 695 days ago #

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I've seen this too - on a very large scale. Yahoo has indexed both search and contextual ads. I can see Google tracking codes right there in the Yahoo SERPs.

@Danny - That's an interesting theory, but I've seen this on such a scale that I'm not sure it could be just from people using bookmarking services. And, like you, I couldn't find any instances of these exact urls published anywhere.

I'd be happy to chat about this in a non-public forum.

from simplepixel 695 days ago #

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@Tim- I agree with you, it seems a little far fetched to believe that all these links are from bookmarking. If you look at Business.com, you can see that it uses some of Google's ads on the right hand side. The links to these pages are intact within the HTML (convoluted, but intact). They must be pulling the ads via the adSense API rather than via an adSense javascript block.

http://www.business.com/search/rslt_default.asp?query=movers&search.x=0&search.y=0

Either way, you would suspect that Yahoo would be able to identify this.

from dannysullivan 695 days ago #

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Yeah, bookmarking is a possibility, but there were so many URLs being listed that I agree, remove.

from TimDineen 695 days ago #

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@ simplepixel, Interesting, thanks for posting this possibility. I considered something similar but didn't try to find an example of HTML-based Google ads. I've seen both search and contextual urls copies via Yahoo so it may be search partners and contextual partners who have API access.

@Danny - the bookmarking theory may not have been enough on its own, but thinking about it a little more: Yahoo has its MyYahoo service and that is not searchable by the general public - thus we'd never be able to find the url reference we had been seeking but Yahoo would still have be informed of the existence of a page that's worthy of crawling by the fact that a user bookmarked it or saved a feed to MyYahoo.

The site I'm speaking of has RSS feed subscription options on most landing pages, so its plausible that a referral from a page to a MyYahoo subscription could cause Yahoo to feel this is a public crawl-worthy page.

Too bad there is no transparency to MyYahoo like other bookmarking services so we could confirm or disprove this. I may try a test on my own.