Googlebot Crawling AdSense WebSearch Pages

[ronniethedodger]

A recent post at The Forum Zone stumbled onto a little tidbit that Googlbot is crawling the AdSense new product WebSearch pages. The poster, ForumJunkie, thought originally that Google was reporting backlinks from the regular JavaScripted AdSense ads.

Originally Posted by ForumJunkie

"Adwords in and of itself is a great tool to help drive additional traffic to your site, but I recently noticed another added benefit.

It appears (and maybe this is common knowledge and I'm just behind the times) that if the Google bot hits a page that happens to be displaying your ad it will treat that add/link just like it would any other. I've noticed links (or at least 'contains the term') to some of my sites that are directly attributed to Adwords.

Has anyone else noticed this, or have I just had too much coffee this morning?"

Maybe a little too much go-go juice FJ! Upon further investigation of this however, it comes to show that Googlebot is actually crawling the WebSearch pages and reporting what it finds there. Cached pages are indeed showing the ads with the complete text including descriptions -- they are not javascripted.

The cached pages will show the "go to www.domain.com" in the actual AdSense ads, as well as, the SERPS that are listed on those pages. The AdSense ads are not javascripted and are coming directly from the adserver at Google, which includes the adserve click link as well. That link does contain the Url of the domain inside the 'href' portion of the anchor element. That url is not a valid one though, it is used in combination with some other javascript ... in other words it is a useless link.

Here is one example that was turned up. If you look in the upper right there is a link labled What is this page? which identifies the page as a WebSearch plus AdSense for search page.

Interesting little find here. How will the links in the SERPS portion of these pages get reported? I would think that it is entirely possible that Google will be reporting them as possible linkbacks. ForumJunkie actually saw the link show up -- but is a little guarded over this:

Originally Posted by ForumJunkie

"When I first posted this thread, it was being picked up as an actual link, not just in the "contains the term" query. That may have abeen a fluke that was quickly corrected."