Ever since Google came up with AdSense, there have been speculations about it! Can place AdSense on your pages pump-up the ranking of your website in Google Search Engine?

The answer from Google’s side has been, obviously, a BIG no!

However, a blog post by Jen, the authority on Contextual Advertising, titled — AdSense mediapartners bot adding to the Google search index — has made the markets of speculations hot again.

Jen quoted Greg Boser from WebmasterRadio.fm’s SEO Rockstars claiming that had seen mediabot information showing up in the natural
search index, which he expanded on his blog –

During last Tuesday’s Rockstar show, I mentioned that I had been working on a project that got a bit messed up due to the fact that Google’s Mediapartner bot was being used to index content for Google’s database. We had setup some 301’s for Googlebot, but had neglected to redirect the AdSense bot. The end result was a whole bunch of duplicate content due to the fact that we were serving the AdSense bot the old url, and Googlebot the new one. Both were getting indexed and added to the cache.

After this, Jen did some investigative work to with her Google Cache and her own log files to find out that the timing of the bot hitting that page of her’s and the timing as being shown by Google cache are the same! Take a look at the screenie below –

She further claimed in one of her comments –

I have a site that Google has indexed EVEN THOUGH EVERY PAGE IS CLEARLY CODED WITH NOINDEX AND GOOGLEBOT IS DISALLOWED IN THE ROBOTS.TXT.

Seems Google is doing a lot it is not supposed to be!

Even though Google Claims —

Participating in Google AdSense does not affect your site’s rank in Google search results and will not affect the search results we deliver. Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web. Our search results are unbiased by our relationships with paying advertisers and publishers. We will continue to show search results according to our PageRank technology.

Adding the Google AdSense ad code or AdSense for search code to your site will not queue your pages for crawling by our main index bots. While our bot (starting with ‘Mediapartners-Google’) does crawl content pages for the purpose of targeting ads, this crawl is not associated with our main index crawl.

Interesting Indeed! Does having AdSense on your site help you pump up your ranking? No one can tell that. But even if it does, I am I am never going to suggest that you use AdSense on your commercial sites where you don’t want your competitors creeping in their ads.