Google has drastically down rated its browser technique in the SERPs, successfully giving itself a hit on the arm, after it became the centre of “sponsored posts” where web owners were paid to advertise a movie about it.
Google Outsourcing Advertising
Google fell afoul of its own recommendations after it used a company called Substance Digital to advertise its browsing technique through a sequence of movie ads, presenting a YouTube movie evidently about a business that has been assisted by its web existence.
The process of putting the movie ads online was then passed down to Unmanageable Advertising, which employed web owners who published the movie – and in a number of cases also authored some content to go with it, often with the phrase: “This publish is provided by Google.” In at least one case, the writer also attached links directly to the Google Chrome download page.
That smashes Google recommendations on purchasing advertising campaigns to force links upthe SERPs, and so it has penalised itself – just at a time when it had been looking at to driving greater adoption of its own technology with Google plus and such.
Still the Right Outcome
The decision, even though Google say they are not directly responsible, has been passed and Google Chrome no longer appears for the term ‘Browser’.
A link to a page describing how to set up Google Chrome is still the top outcome in a Google or Ask search for “chrome”, as well as having an offer for the browser placed above the Google search in the PPC ads.
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s team which fights web spam, wrote in explanation:
“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.”
Cutts was adamant that the purpose of the strategy was “[only] to get people to watch video clips – not link to Google”.
But it is not clear why Google would pay an organization to get web owners to publish a movie if it did not expect that it would have some larger benefit to its item’s awareness in web ratings.