Follow Up of the Day: Earlier this week, Google was caught running a campaign of sponsored blog posts to promote its Google Chrome browser, apparently in violation of its own terms of service.
Although Google says it paid for a video advertising campaign and got the sponsored posts instead due to a misunderstanding, the company has still agreed to punish itself the way it would punish any other violator: by drastically reducing the search ranking of the promoted page.
In this case, that means the download page for Google Chrome has dropped to the fifth page of results in a search for “browser,” and doesn’t even make page one in a search for “Chrome” (although a Google Chrome installation help page still shows up).
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, explained the decision in a blog post, writing:
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.
Cutts says the Chrome download page has been demoted for 60 days, at which point Google can submit a reconsideration request, just like any other webmaster.
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