Search engines following Adwords links

Can they crawl them? Or do they even?

[thaedge]

Now that I asked the question I will state my feeling on this: my gut, what I've read, and what I've heard all says no Google and other SE's dont crawl them.

My problem is that I have some coworkers that are going out of their way to build all sorts of measures to stop these URLS from being exposed and looked at as dupe content.

Has anyone really ever experienced a crawler(s) following your google/yahoo ads from the search engine results or content placement? I cant imagine there have been more then a few odd and fluke occurances but it doesnt hurt to ask.

So has anyone ever seen/had this happen?

Other places it was brought up:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[treeline]

Well, the good news is all the top sites will get taken out if there's a dupe penalty for matching adwords. Then you can swoop in and get rich.

Until you get taken out too. Then there will be nobody left to show adwords, and Google revenue will drop precipitously, leading to a stock market crash.

Hmmm.... I hope some of those so-called geniuses have a little common sense. You know those absent-minded professor types.