Yahoo Search Indexing Google AdWords Links

By Loren Baker, Editor | January 19, 2007

Some disturbing news about Yahoo Search and the indexing of Google AdWords links.

Seems that the Yahoo index is including Google AdWords and other PPC tracking links for some Google advertisers which are messing up their backend tracking and analysis.

Doubtful Google is charging for these clickthru’s, but when you see hundreds of users landing on a Google AdWords specific landing page from Yahoo Search, there’s going to be some weird numbers.

Barry Schwartz picked up a thread in Webmaster World:

Is anyone else noticing that Yahoo is picking up Google Adwords links? I only know because i append all of my Google and other PPC links with a src=#*$!X and my tracking software also appends similar information.

Other webmasters have responded with confirmation of the same problems.

Interesting that these are AdWords results, and not AdSense, since AdSense shown on so many web pages.

I wonder if Yahoo is crawling Google search results or Domain Parking ads and indexing the AdWords links or if this is from AdSense?

Goes to show however that even though we build most of our linking strategies around organic links, java served links,ads, and no follow links are still crawlable and can influence search engine results.

The value of that influence is, in this case, questionable.