Are PPC ads really affecting organic rankings?

A post on SearchEngineWatch yesterday asked the question “Are PPC Ads Now Counting in Google Organic Backlinks?” A question I was tempted to reject out of hand as tosh (this would be incredibly damaging for Google if this was really true), but after reading through the post I couldn’t discount it entirely without some research of my own.

This issue is more interesting than I initially thought. Basically what is being said in the article is that for one of the author’s client websites, a number of backlinks were appearing in Webmaster Tools that appeared to show links coming from an AdWords/YSM campaign. Not only this, but the website ranks #1 in Google for a phrase only used in the PPC campaign, and which is not in the content of the page that ranks for the phrase:

So after a bit  digging in Yahoo (search for ["ga nc tn & tx land sale" bluegreen] in Yahoo, and see screengrab below), I can see what appears to be happening, is that these particular ads have been syndicated across a bunch of the spammy pseudo search engines you see so many of these days.

In this low-quality syndication network, the JavaScript code they’re using in these sponsored links is shown below:

<a href="[[adurl]]" ONMOUSEOVER="window.status='http://www.BluegreenCommunities.com';return true;">anchor text</a>

I counted only 2 302 redirects on the ad URL redirection chain before the spider hits a robots.txt block. This means Google may have either given up following these redirects before it reaches the robots.txt file, hit the robots file and decided to try another route, or was treating the JavaScript element as a different link entirely.

Now the clue that Google is following the JavaScript code element in this case is that it is the domain, and not the ad destination URL that gets the anchor text credit, accounting for the homepage ranking #1 for the query in question, and not the advertising URL.

This is rather odd, because “window.status” is not a JavaScript link function, and implies Google’s JavaScript crawling isn’t as advanced as they want us to think. Looks to me like they’re just running a regex for anything that looks like a URL inside a onmouseover/onclick/etc command – this requires testing, but if that’s it, surely that’s pretty primitive?

I think it’s fairly clear this is a screw up in Google’s JavaScript crawl implementation, so will likely be fixed in (very) short order. In the meantime, I’m thinking of setting up an AdWords campaign or two…