Yahoo Search Indexing Yahoo Search Marketing Advertisers?
Yahoo Search, never one to keep a division between Church (organic search) and State (paid search), is reported to be giving its Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture) advertisers a jump on other sites in its organic search index. And no this is not Site Match.
EmoMilk posts on Webmaster World that Yahoo Slurp is uber-crawling his site and using his Overture ads as a point of entry. From “Slurp entering site through Overture Ads” on Webmaster World :
Since the start of the month we’ve noticed some very strange Slurp activity in our logs. On four seperate days (all Thursday mornings) we had Slurp bombarding our site for about an hour with over 1000 requests, all of these being referals from our Overture Ads (the URLs include our ppc tracking parameters etc). For each referal Slurp requested the same three pages (the landing page, the page it 301s to and then a page linked from that page). Unfortunately I havn’t been able to check with our PPC team to see if the clicks correlate and we’re actually paying for them.
My first suspicion was that this might be click fraud, as the IP addresses are different to other Slurp IPs that we saw crawling at the same time (with usual behaviour). The new IPs were:
66.196.92.14
66.196.92.17
66.196.92.19
These all check out as Inktomi.
So, is advertising with Yahoo Search Marketing a way to jump-start the crawling of your site by Slurp?
