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"These are not singular cases, rather there are several million links within the MSNindex," states Thomas Kaiser, CEO of cyberpromote.
Google may possibly be pleased that every click on these results could produce anincreased number of hits within the Adwords and AdSense accounts. Questionable iswhether or not Google examines the referrer of each hit. cyberpromote could notverify whether or not costs are incurred for clients due to these links.
Microsoft undoubtedly has no interest in having these links indexed in their MSNsearch engine. Furthermore, these occurrences are surprising since Google hasenforced certain implementations to prevent these links from being indexed. Therobots.txt file at http://www.google.com/robots.t xt contains the relevant entries toprevent the indexing.
"It is incomprehensible why Google's robots.txt file is disregarded by MSN,especially due to the obvious reason that it is only detrimental towards Microsoft",continued Mr. Kaiser.
As a general rule, all search engines adhere to the entries within robots.txt files.In addition, AdSense links should not be indexed since the entries athttp://pagead2.googlesyndic ation.com/robots.txt clearly state not to index theselinks.
During analysis pertaining to specified keywords, cyberpromote found high searchengine positions in the MSN results which belong to Google's Adwords and AdSenseprograms. Due to the strong positions of these links, it is relevant that they willusually result in a substantial number of hits.
After finding these existing links, cyberpromote's inquiries pertaining to Google'sAdSense program produced more than one million links within the MSN index (seescreenshots). The links for the AdWords program produced an even more startlingnumber with over 4 million indexed results.
It is assumed that Microsoft will most likely delete these links shortly after thenotification of these facts. In any case, it is also likely that Microsoft willinvestigate the reasons as to why the robots.txt files have been ignored. Aproblematic issue concerns MSN's lack of identifying these links clearly asadvertising links. Conclusively, these links are advertisements, regardless of anyunintentional forms.
For the clients of the AdWords and AdSense campaigns, it would be helpful if Googlestated whether or not clicks from these links are calculated. Up until now thestatements from Google pertaining to invalid clicks have been vague at best. On theother hand, one can also argue that regardless of whether or not these links arecalculated, the quality of visitors may still be advantageous.
This press release including additional screen shots can be found at http://www.cyberpromote.de/pr esse/pressemitteilungen.htm
