Yahoo Scraping Google Adwords?

[vicyankees]

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 trackign software also appends similar information.

[bill]

I just noticed this as well. I hadn't checked my Yahoo SERPs in a while and just noticed that they indexed several of my AdWords pages. What's up with that?

I guess the first question would be, 'how do we get them to stop it?' Do I have to change all of my AdWords tracking codes?

[GregD]

I've noticed that the urls we use to advertise on Business.com have got into Yahoo’s index. i.e. www.mysite.com?source=bus.com

So far it has only been for long tail queries. I would sure like to know why this has happened.

[JeremyL]

If this is not just some random occurrence where someone used the url on a webpage, this would mean Google was rendering and following links in JS.

Either that or the url data is getting passed to Yahoo some other way. I vote for the later.

[inbound]

Toolbars...

If your page is publically accessible by a browser (and has people actually visiting it) then expect the big search engines to find it evntually.

This does have worrying issues for managing a site, looks at though banning robots and other measures are required for pages we previously didn't think would end up in the SERPS.

[beren]

Yes! I noticed this a couple months ago when my tracking system indicated AdWords clicks coming from Yahoo. I investigated and saw that these were from SERPS listings with the AdWords code.

At SES Chicago I asked a Yahoo rep is this would be a problem as far as duplicate content penalties. He didn't seem to understand my concern and only questioned how Yahoo would know about these URLs. I said I guessed it was the toolbar.

More recently, I asked the question on Yahoo's search blog because I am concerned about a duplicate content penalty (the URLs show up in SiteExplorer, too). No answer.

[Nuttakorn]

Which keyword when you search that you found those adwords? I have searched several keywords, it is still Overture link.

[vicyankees]

Just do a site: request on your domain and look for the urls that you use in Google. I can easily identify them because I append "src=google" to every keyword in my google account.

[MLHmptn]

This is something I noticed back on the July 13th '06 update and it's still prevalent today. Was quite surprised to see nobody else noticed it 6 months ago! Really makes you wonder how many times you've had to pay for SPIDER clicks!

[webmasterworld.com ]

[edited by: MLHmptn at 2:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2007]

[bill]

The people at the Yahoo! Search Blog have addressed this specifically and provided a simple way to keep these sorts of tracking URIs out of their SERPs.

Keeping Ad Tracking and Dead URLs out of Yahoo! Search [ysearchblog.com]

If you don't want Yahoo! Slurp, our Web crawler to index these URLs you can use wildcards in robots.txt. For example, if you are using the parameter 'ref' to track ad sources, you can use a rule like the one below to keep your tracking URLs from being Slurped:

User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /*ref=YahooPublisherNetwork

[vicyankees]

Thanks - This is exactly what I've been looking for.

[bill]

I just wanted to follow up and report that all of my tracking code URIs have now disappeared from Yahoo's SERPs after implementing this. My site dropped a few slots in a few cases, but that may have been due to something else.

[Vimes]

Still waiting for mine to disappear placed the entry in the bot file the same day still seeing 100’s of links that shouldn’t be there.

Vimes.