Google Penalizes Itself Over Google Chrome Advertising Campaign

I been following along the ongoing saga of the latest Google drama of the company supposedly buying links to bolster its search engine rankings.

For those of who have not read this, you can do so at SearchEngineLand.

Basically, the issue is that Google went to a company that specializes in Internet video marketing, UnrulyMedia, and asked them to promote Google Chrome. UnrulyMedia then turns around, produces a video and pays websites to place the video on their pages whenever someone watches it.

Unfortunately what appears to have happened, is that the publishers of UnrulyMedia (the websites), chose to place spammy blog posts with the video in it. Some contained links to Google Chrome which got website marketers and SEO experts screaming foul. You see, when you are a website owner that pays someone to put a link intentionally on their page with the intent to increase search engine ranking, it is a Google violation and your website is penalized.

In this case, the perception is that Google tried to game its own search engine by paying bloggers indirectly to put Google Chrome anchor tag links in their blog posts. The more posts that exist talking about Google Chrome and showing the video, the more website ranking their Google Chrome home page gets. In the case where if they tried to promote the word "browser", they would be gaming their search engine to beat out browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari.

In addition, a third party was involved that acted as a intermediary between UnrulyMedia and Google - Essence Digital. In a post on Google+ Essence Media said:

"We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn't authorize this."

An official statement from Google was later released:

"Google never agreed to anything more than online ads," the spokeswoman said. "We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We're now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again".

And through my own research, I agree. To me it was a case where bloggers created posts that were spammy, or suspect in nature, and wrote about Google Chrome in very poor quality and style in efforts to get their visitors to click on the ad. UnrulyMedia and Essence Digital should have been monitoring all blog posts for quality for they were the subcontractor promoting the Chrome campaign.

They obviously didn't and now Google has been embarrassed and reputation soiled due to a poor strategy from hired contractors to promote Google Chrome. To save face, they had to penalize themselves for it.

The slap on the wrist will be that the Google Chrome main website will be penalized in the search engine results for 60 days. Now, whenever you search on the phrase "google chrome", you will not see the main google chrome website listed in the top search pages. In fact, as I write this Google Chrome's main website isn't even on the first 100 search positions. When I type in "browser", Google Chrome ranks very low in the 73rd position.

What is to be said here is that if you are a website that subcontracts out to third party online marketing firms, you should stipulate in your legal contract that they should perform monitoring on their publishers and kick them out and remove the posts as part of their agreement. Also, you as the website owner should monitor that progress as well to double check up on them to avoid a potential disaster like this.

For website owners who rely upon search engine traffic to drive visits, this could mean a loss in revenue, if not a long drawn out penalty phase that could destroy your online business. For Google who has been slowly climbing and taking market share away from the likes of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, this is a big deal.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.