While looking through Yahoo’s index of one of our clients, I noticed something strange.

Yahoo has picked up links that are ONLY used for our Google AdWords’ or Business.com campaigns. This suggests one of three things:

1. Yahoo spiders and indexes Google’s search results
2. Yahoo spiders and indexes adSense ads on Google’s content network
3. Both #1 and #2

So what implications does this have? Well for one, it could potentially skew tracking for the AdWords campaigns if there was traffic being sent to these URLs. It also artificially inflates Yahoo’s page count (which may or may not be such a bad thing). It appears Yahoo isn’t intelligent enough to recognize what it has picked up and that the extra parameters do not yield unique pages.

So how do you go about removing these URLs from Yahoo’s index? You can delete them by clicking the ‘Delete URL’/Path’ link. Yahoo only allows you to delete up to 25 deletes per site. MovingExplorer.com has 141 variation of the index.php with tracking parameters. They have also seemed to use Google AdWords’ ad Title as the page title for of the URLs.

It appears everyone loves and uses Google. Even Yahoo. Does anyone know of a way to prevent this from happening?

Check out comments on this posting on Sphinn. Feel free to Sphinn it too…