Google AdSense text spidered and affecting serps

Has this been discussed?

[Robert Charlton]

Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere. It's something I first noticed in early Florida serps and mentioned, but I haven't seen any explicit follow up. I haven't, though, followed all Florida threads.

I'm noticing increasingly that Google is spidering and indexing AdSense text. In Florida, many Amazon pages, eg, were ranking for various phrases was because of the anchor text of contextually related AdSense ads appearing on the pages. Often, by the time you got to these pages, the ads were no longer there, but they were in the cache.

I'm also seeing AdSense text in searches for exact phrases on Google.

What I'm wondering is whether this is a bug or something Google is going to be continuing to do as part of whatever it's doing. It certainly does/did give high PR pages carrying AdSense ads a shot at boosting their rankings for those "filtered" phrases. Or, it might mess up some pages by increasing the exact repetitions of a phrase.

My own opinion is that it's something I don't think that Google should be doing, but I don't know that there's an easy way for them to avoid it.

[mil2k]

I'm noticing increasingly that Google is spidering and indexing AdSense text.

I haven't seen this discussed. It's really intriguing. Would certainly like it being discussed further.

[Yidaki]

This would mean that google reads, executes and parses external java script. I've never seen this.

[Imaster]

Adsense ads are basically Iframes and I am not certain whether Google crawls and indexes the content of the iframes and associate the content with the page having the iframe tag.

[Robert Charlton]

I've been able to locate two of the pages I was thinking of...

One is in the Google Sponsored Links returned on the cache of an Amazon page... not the traditional little AdSense boxes. It certainly doesn't appear to be an iframe. I'm not good at interpreting this kind of code, but the text of the ad appears to be embedded in a very long url. I think I can post the beginning of it without revealing anything confidential...

<a href="/exec/obidos/handle-generic-form/?action=next-page&target=web-search/what-you-think.html&fb.url-encoded.1=http%253A//www.google.com/url%253Fq%253Dhttp%253A//www.beginadlinktexthere...

The other example I could find is a listing that I'd taken to be Google, because it looks so much like AdWords/AdSense, but I hadn't remembered well where I'd seen it. It's actually an Overture "Sponsor Results" down the right side of a Yahoo directory page. Text for the ads are in html on the page... no separate iframed content.

I'm not finding a traditional AdSense boxed ad producing these results.

Google or Overture... I can see these contextual ads having the possibility to skew a lot of spidered results unless the engines address this. In the meantime, it seems to be a loophole.

[john316]

Try This search [google.com]

google has been indexing adsense content for some time, nothing new.

[TheDave]

Yep, had a couple of my ads indexed. Both were on amazon which made me wonder if they were doing it server-side? Most adsense ads are served up through a javascript which the googlebot wouldn't run.

[globay]

john316,

I looked at the search result, but I coudn't find anything strange, or unexpected. All results had "Ads by Google" on their page!

Please tell me, if I am wrong

[JasonHamilton]

globay, you are correct. The example search given was not a valid one.

All the pages listed actually contained "Ads by Google" in the html document itself.

edit: I didn't mean to make it sound as if I had checked all the links. I only checked about 20, using the 'cached' page so that "ads by google" is highlighted in yellow.

[Robert Charlton]

I don't get john316's example at all.

What I saw on Amazon was a page for a book about widgets attracting context-related AdSense ads containing "widget maintenance" in their link text. The page then ranked very high for widget maintenance searches.

Though I didn't analyze the backinks to the Amazon page, the page itself, without the AdSense ads, had no "widget maintenance" related content, and the word "maintenance" was mentioned only in the AdSense link text.

While I realize that part of the interest in my question is how the ads are spidered, I think the question of search skewing is, in the long term, the really important one.