Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.

Google dishes out new AdSense format

Posted by multippt

Sounds like Google is experimenting with a new format which is able to show more ad units using the same amount of space. Expect the new 336X280 pixel and 180X150 pixel units to be coming soon. This format is similar to the original ads, except that it shows 4 ads at once instead of the usual 3 or 2. It might look a little jumbled up, but at least it does show more ads.

The format is not listed in the official Ad formats page, but it is being tested. There is still a low probability of it appearing amonst your ads, so it’s a perfect opportunity to have a screenshot when you do see one.