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A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google is indexing and ranking ads from Google AdSense.
To see evidence for yourself, just search on this popular Google AdSense ad found throughout the web for a Google product. Here, search on "Get The Data You Need Faster". Up comes many results, many of those results are triggered from Google AdSense ads, most from Google Parked Domain ads.
Here is one example of a parked domain ad with the Google AdSense ads being indexed:
I don't believe this is a new occurrence, but it should be pointed out and corrected by Google.
Why? * It skews advertiser's results by letting GoogleBot crawl the pages * It shows up in the Google cache * Google ads should not be indexed by Google as part of your page content * and more...
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Marios Alexandrou
12/04/2007 12:35 pm
I don't think this is new either, but it would be nice if Google fixed the issue. I can't remember when it started, but for quite some time I've been getting Google Alerts with results that were triggered by ads I was running on Google's content network.
Lex G
12/04/2007 01:19 pm
Adsense ads shouldn't be part of your pages content ... true, I though that Google's mission was to deliver relevant results too ... Lex
Sebastian
12/04/2007 01:46 pm
Doh! Paid linky by Google that count for rankings ... Matt's nightmares come true. ;)
Evan
12/04/2007 01:54 pm
Figures..more rankings for their advertisers...
Gerben Coumou
12/04/2007 02:05 pm
Regular AdSense-content can't be indexed as it's content is served via JavaScript. In this case, the example domain is part of the GoDaddy CashParking program (AdSense based). They've set the robots-tag at 'index,nofollow', though. So rankings won't be affected.
Kari
12/04/2007 02:32 pm
Definitely not new, and not just with Google's own ads. I've seen the same thing with Adsense ads for other companies.
Barry Schwartz
12/04/2007 02:44 pm
Gerben, but they are indexed and cached.
Terry Van Horne
12/05/2007 02:55 pm
Definitely since Florida which is the first time I found them. Also note that it seems to be more prevalent this time of year, not to say that Google would push partners and advertisers up the organic results on purpose. I'm sure it's just coinkydink that it happens every year about this time!