Why does ad content get indexed?

[Discovery]

I see this alot.

In our analytics and in searches I find organic rankings for sites based on Adcenter ads. For example do a search for any company name you are advertising with, that would be in your display URL, and you get a number of results from where your ad has run.

This seems to me to be a flaw in the algo. Why in the world would a dynamic ad be concidered relevant to a search engines ranking algo?

I have found this on Live.com, Google and Yahoo.

Would it not be easy for SE's to see which content is from advertising programs and ignore it?

Are SEO's using ads to improve organic rankings in this way?

Discovery

[bradbox]

I would guess that a Search Engine will crawl the text, but the links won't count (because the link actually goes to Google Adwords rather than directly to the advertiser's site).

We use Google Alerts quite a lot for client sites to work out what (and when) content is being crawled and AdWords often come up.

I would imagine that its difficult for crawlers to prevent the ads from being parsed.

[AussieWebmaster]

glitches in new crawlers may be looking at the landing page and not grabbing the redirect - the spider follows the link but records the final destination url - could be when they are testing ways to make redirects more efficient or some such... am not a programmer and is just a guess

[Discovery]

I'm no SEO junky but I have found that when you append a link pointing to your target website from another website with extra data it almost always gets treated as a unique link.

www.mysite.com?referal=linkin
www.mysite.com?referal=linktwo
in addition to
www.mysite.com/default.asp

All get listed as seperate listings.

Discovery