The idea of this post was gotten from Hesham Zebida of FamousBloggers.net
How would you feel if you found out that Google, itself was found guilty of buying sponsored reviews for its popular browser, Google Chrome? I know you wouldn’t even believe that Google can do such a thing? But, that is how it happened earlier this month when Google was caught, as reported by Search Engine Land, with its Chrome’s video ad campaign.
In the ad, Google the marketer was trying to purchase a paid reviews for Google Chrome, and the original Google found out about the move and then took action to demote Chrome from its search pages to show people that its verdict about quality guidelines.
Why? It happened because that action violates Google’s guidelines against sponsored or paid links!
Do you imagine what would’ve happen if Google, the original dictator meets face-to-face with Google the marketer?
Though, it is not Google the dictator who made such move but the fake Google marketer who was paid to promote Google Chrome video ad without a link back to Chrome’s page was the cause of this – the marketer while buying those illegal links bought some from a website that mistakenly link back to the page.
Google Can No Longer Keep Track of its Own Rules
Danny Sullivan of SEL was wondering:
“if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?”
And in response to that statement, Matt Cutts said:
“Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double checked, and the video players were not flowing PageRank to Google either.
However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines.
In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”
Read more on this Google+ post by Matt.
Google Is Getting More Respect for this Action!
Google’s building more authority by taking this action because its failure to take such action can lead to loosing more trusts from people.
What do you think about this action by Google in demoting Chrome from its search pages? Is Google taking this action because of the negative responses from the SEO’s and small business owners or what could have been the case? Please add your comment below and let’s learn new thing.
BTW, you can read more of this article by checking Danny Sullivan’s post on search engine land and Matt Cutts’ post on his blog.
