Yesterday Google was accused of cheating through the use of sponsored links; a practice they actively discourage. In a surprising twist, the company has now accepted that they were in the wrong and dropped themselves in their own search engine rankings as punishment.
In a classic case of ‘practising what they preach’, Google took the decision to manually drop the Chrome product in Google search results pages. The error occurred when an external agency was commissioned to promote a video about Chrome, who in turn paid for various bloggers to post the video.
Some instances of the video being posted also had some text below, which mentioned that the blog post was sponsored by Google Chrome, and in one instance of this, the text was found to have a link to the Chrome product within it. This practise of paying someone to link back to you is against Google’s guidelines.
Matt Cutts, of Google’s webspam team, explained that google.com/chrome would be demoted for at least 60 days. After this point, someone from the Chrome team would be able to submit a reconsideration request.
“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, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3”
Matt Cutts, on Google +, 4th January 2011
Whether this is a clever PR stunt, or a genuine reaction, this is a very smart move from the search giant. Not only are they getting promotion for their Chrome browser on some of the world’s top media outlets, they are also hammering the point across to website teams across the world: paying for links is bad!
[...] world’s most popular search engine; Google, has been punished by none other than themselves for unethical SEO practices. The search giant was found to have cheated through the use of sponsored links; a practice they [...]