We've always been told that AdWords does not affect organic search. So I decided to do some investigating of my own on this issue with our clients. My first thought was one of our bigger clients in the home security business, so I started there. Now, with an across-the-board repetition of ad titles in their AdWords account, it should not have been hard to find in the "What Googlebot Sees" section under Statistics.
But there was nothing.
Then again, with the size of this company, their online work, their links from so many sources in terms of industry sites, financial reports, and other sources, maybe the ads weren't in the Top 100 anchor text phrases.
So I decided to move on to their other industry-their .
And you know what?
BAM! There is was-AdWords ad titles in the "What Googlebot Sees" list.
Funny thing-these phrases are not used in the titles anymore. They are old and have long since been edited to lines that reference the AlarmCare name and were the original titles. They may also have been inserted using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion tool since they are also keywords from the campaigns.
Now, the big question to answer is, "But is there not a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' attached to this anchor text link? And the answer is...not on the domain in the ad itself, but there is a robots disallow command on the redirect site Google and Yahoo ads go through first before ending up on the domain being advertised.
Mark theorizes in his article that this is an unintended result of Google's efforts to index JavaScript, AJAX, Flash, and other codes in recent months, and that it will soon be fixed. This seems to be the best bet, as leaving this ability to index for SEO based on ad titles might once again lead us in to a 'wild west' showdown with shady marketers keen on not only building traffic to their sites, but to redirect people to fake sites and potentially dangerous sites.
Something to watch in Webmaster Tools as the year rolls on.