Google Penalizing Its Own Google Chrome Search Results For Violating Google Paid Link Rules

from the left-hand,-right-hand dept

Well, this is interesting. Earlier this week Aaron Wall noticed that Google's Chrome team appeared to be sponsoring blog posts about Google that have direct links to Google Chrome, without any attempt to hide those from search bots... in contradiction to the rules that it has for others against buying links. Danny Sullivan dug into the details a little bit more and found that it was "jaw-dropping" in how it clearly violated Google's own rules, and just how ridiculous the entire campaign appears to be.

In response, Google has basically said that it never signed up for such a campaign, and appears to suggest that the advertising firm it hired was part of the problem. That firm, Essence Digital, more or less took the blame. However, Sullivan also notes that the actual campaign appears to have been run by a video company called Unruly. The whole thing seems like a mess, with Google not closely monitoring the companies it hired for the marketing campaign.

Either way, Google actually does appear to be taking this seriously -- as its anti-spam team is saying that it's going to reduce the Google PageRank for the Chrome team. That's actually fairly surprising -- as you basically have a company agreeing to punish itself for breaking its own rules, whereas most companies caught in this kind of situation would likely try to brush it off as not important...

Filed Under: chrome, google punishment, paid advertising, search links, sponsored links
Companies: google