Some of you may have noticed Google advertisements showing up in Live Search results today. We have identified and resolved the issue, and you should see these disappear over the next couple days.

The issue stems from the way Live Search handles content disallowed by the Robots.txt file. We regularly check the robots.txt file of a site to ensure that we don’t index and cache pages excluded by the webmaster. However, if we do find a link elsewhere on the web pointing to a page excluded by the robots.txt file, we may include the link and the anchor text in our index if we think it might be valuable to our users. Yesterday we accidently began including the links from the ads of Google AdSense customers. The issue has been fixed, and you should see the results disappear from our search results over the next couple days.

We’d like to thank Search Engine Land and several customers for contacting us earlier today, your feedback is much appreciated and helped us quickly identify and resolve this issue.

–Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Center