Ouch! Hobbs, does it show up in the cache also? And if so, how about the text cache?

Yes, I can see it in the cache with the advertiser domain name highlighted inside the ad, which is within a 'Sponsored Links' ad block of a GoDaddy parked page.

The recent change in ad clickable area appears to be what's causing this, I am seriously hoping it's a glitch!

Copy the text on an adsense ad then paste it into Google between quotation marks. I noticed this a couple days ago and thought it was curious.

I noticed this a few times several months ago. A competitor who had top SERPs for keyword1 keyword2 was getting his Adsense ad text caught/cached. That ad link had anchor text keyword1 keyword2.

I noticed this when I was trying to figure out how he was getting higher than my site in SERPs. I looked further and noticed he had both keywords as the alt tag for his site icon that was linked to his home page, which also had both keywords in the home page title.

It was thus difficult to conclude Adsense was helping his SERP scores.

p/g

I have noticed this as well. We had even had?gclid= in SERPs because either someone clicked on our ad and linked to us or something else. We had to block those in robots.txt. We noticed that our ads from Google WERE getting indexed the way we made the ad...

www.example.com/Site-Folder/

which is wrong because we only use upper case for ads so it SHOULD be:

www.example.com/site-folder/

so we had to fix that problem as well. Google is DEFINITELY indexing those ads from somewhere, maybe those darn parked pages or MFA sites? OR it could be from one of their premium publishers where the ads show up in the page and the code is used differently on those sites? Google is hurting the very people that feed them...by making them have to chase their tail like a dog trying to fix every darn duplicate content error and such caused by the ads we pay them for...

MSN Live Search is indexing Adwords/Adsense URLs, which may be causing a problem from that source. They're all over their SERPs, try looking for your keywords there.

This is not good at all.

I don't think this is anything new, is it?

I remember seeing snippets in Google SERPS which were from Adsense panels way back in 2004. I saw this only once. Later, they fixed it.

As for adwords bumps to serps, I've seen it. And what I've found is that when your in a competitive niche people tend to have scraped sites, MFA, what not. And those ads do end up in the serps of other search engines (apparently Google didn't share the trick on how to not read its ads). When those ads show up in other search engines Google eventually ends up with the the same ad text and url. How do I know this is true? I use unique urls and strings that have only ever been used for adwords. Not to slam google, the same works true with adcenter and yahoo ads.

That's a nice fringe benefit. Their links are getting higher rankings due to more inbound links.

Now we know their stock is a million dollars a share.

Maybe they need to use no-follow tags - the same as they tell everyone else to do with "paid links" ;)

Actually, I've been seeing this for a while - a year or more. I considered it useful in figuring out where my clients' ads were being displayed, before we had placement reports. I don't think it's anything new.

This really isn't news... they've been indexing parked domains for years.

This "double-dipping" is bad enough.

But even worse for searchers, they visit a page via the SERPs, only to find the page's content doesn't have their keywords in it - and the ad has since changed, so they can't find the word they search for on the page Google gave them!

Surely Google couldn't complain that it is technically difficult to exclude their own ads from their own SERPs

The examples I found such as the domain park were all premium publishers or domain parks meaning that they aren't running AdSense javascript and the ads are included server side so they look like normal content to the crawler.

I'm pretty sure AdSense doesn't count Google's crawl as a valid click.

Willybefriendly is right, Google needs to start utilizing nofollow tags in their ads. After all don't they preach that nofollow ought to be used for advertising?

call me cynical, but perhaps google know that with recent updates that the overall adsense sites depending on bought and spammy links, have droppd in the serps reducing adwords income. As a result tweak the algo to increase the adwords income for xmas, whilst eerybody else suffers.

I'm probably wrong, but you never know.

I have seen this also and I don't think there is anything we can really do about it.

The ads are delivered server-side, so Google has no choice but to index the text.

OTOH, the actual links would have to go through a redirect script (in order to be tracked), and I'm sure Google would block them from passing any link juice to the advertiser's page.

It's very simple - Google is ultimately responsible for the ads, which means they have the ability to include a marker that says the text is one of their ads - so therefore they can exclude that text from the SERPs.

Either they don't care about this problem, or they don't care enough to fix it.