In Google Webmaster Tools, Google is reporting Bing’s search result URLs as actual backlinks to a website. Google has as history of sometimes making a mistake and indexing Bing’s search results, like I found a while back. But this is the first time that I have seen that Google is actually telling webmasters that there is a link to their website: and that link is a Bing search result URL. Google shows Bing search results URLs. Definitely something that I don’t think Google planned on.
Take a look at what I’m seeing in Google Webmaster Tools. I was investigating the crawl errors, and noticed that there was a page that supposedly had an error (and it does) so I clicked to see where that URL is linked from. And low and behold, it’s linked from Bing’s search results:
I’m not going to reveal the actual URL that Google has linked in this case, as it would reveal a client’s URL and some other information that I don’t think is relevant in this case. But here is a sample of the Bing search result URL that Google says is linked:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=bill+hartzer&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=bill+hartzer&format=rss
By me linking to that URL, let’s just see if Google picks it up and indexes it, as they have done in other cases.
Notice that the URL is a result of a search query for my name, bill hartzer. I took added &format=rss to the end of the search results query and that brings up an RSS feed of the Bing search results. That’s actually useful, as you could put that URL into your RSS reader if you so desired, to monitor the search results at Bing (if you wanted to do that).
But nonetheless, somehow Google has decided to index or crawl the Bing search results (they had to crawl that URL in order to actually have the URL in their index… ) in order to tell me that it’s a link to my site in Google Webmaster Tools?