AdSence Glitch?

[bulkin]

hey guys,

first of all - hello! and second - i'm going to the conference in New Orleans! i’m so excited! and i have a question:

we've noticed today that one of our competitor’s PR went UP. the reason is that according to google he has 4,200 links to his site - all originating from one site! when i looked at that site linking to our competitor, I found no links to him, but since the site displays google AdSence, i suspect that the may have happened:

The site itself is about software drivers and our competitor's site is about human Drivers (car operators). I guess at one point due to this word game, he was displaying our competitor’s AdSence ads on the 4,200 pages and google indexed these ads as credible links to my competitor.

What can I do? I only have 40+ links to my site and cannot compete with his 4,200… Should I report him as spam to Google? Is google aware of this issue?

thanks much!

:)
p.s. sorry for using "software drivers" and "human drivers". i didn't know how to make the analogy with widgets.

[hunderdown]

I don't think the Googlebot would count an AdSense ad as a link.

Even if it did, if the ads are gone, then it's only a matter of time before the index gets updated.

Wait it out.

[Zygoot]

It can't be Adsense, Google doesn't index Javascript. And also the Adsense ads don't link directly to the advertisers. They link to Google which then redirects to the advertiser.

[bhartzer]

Zygoot is right--it cannot be AdSense, Googlebot doesn't read javascript and therefore won't count the links.

If you want to study the backlinks the site really has, check the site's backlinks in MSN.

[bulkin]

Thank much for your input. If it is not AdSence - then I'm completely lost... The site that links to the competitor is a legit established business (not in the U.S. but I researched them)... and we just noticed that another competitor is having the same issue. 1200 links to him from one site (different one, but also foreign)... This is so odd!

i'm lost...

[PatrickDeese]

Did you check the cache? did you search the source code?

It is very common for people to buy ROS (run of site) advertising links - it could be that the links were removed after they were shown as backlinks.

Just because a site has more links than you doesn't mean it is spam.

Just because a site ranks above you doesn't make it spam.

though many webmasters think it should.

[bulkin]

PatrickDeese,

I appreciate your input. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear for which I apologize, let me try to rephrase:

I have noticed this morning, that all of a sudden a site of my competitor got credited for having 4,200 links coming from the same site, and later discovered that another one got 1,000 from a deferent site.

Since I have never seen anything link this before, I decided to post on the forum and see if anyone else has ever seeing anything like this.

I did check cache and I searched the source code - nothing there.

You are correct of course, I understand and completely agree that if a site has more links than mine doesn't mean it's spamming. I just thought that this was kind of unusual and tried to get some opinions...

Thanks again to all.

[rbacal]

While we can never be sure about anything, I can confirm that google the search engine, will in fact, index (on occasion) it's own google ads, in effect reading its own javascript. (I can't comment on pr effects).

I noticed this when doing google searches on some topics related to my sites, which I did because I was getting referrals from sites that simply didn't make sense. So, I did some tracking.

Let's say I was running adwords ads for widgets and they were shown on content sites and search sites. When I did a search on widgets, the search results would return a page which shouldn't have come up, and it returned the EXACT wording of my adwords ads.

I was actually coming up as being mentioned on amazon, again, with the exact phrasing.

The only way this could happen is if the google search engine was indexing the ads.

I suspect it's a temporary glitch, but haven't really checked back.

PS. Google also indexes, on occasion, perl/cgi script results -- ie. mydomain.com/cgi-bin/bozo/bozo.cgi

[bulkin]

thanks much rbacal,

i myself have noticed several times adsence ads being indexed, hence my first theory.

:)

val