Google to Penalize Itself for Mistake in Paid Marketing Campaign
- Posted on January 4, 2012 at 9:43am by
Liz Klimas
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On Tuesday, we reported that Google’s marketing firm, Unruly, was caught violating Google’s own policy in a campaign paying bloggers to write about Google Chrome for small businesses. Now, Google is penalizing itself as it would other violators for the mistake.
The mistake was that in at least one post a link was present without a “nofollow” attribute, which is used to make sure search results don’t favor paid advertising. Unruly’s CEO said that not including “nofollow” was a technical mistake that was remedied when the firm found out.
Search Engine Land (via CNET) reports that Google has now “demoted” Chrome in its search results, even though the company doesn’t believe any violations occurred. Search Engine Land has more from Google’s response:
We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.
We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.
While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.
Search Engine Land goes on to note that before Google took this action, searching the word “browser” on its site resulted in Chrome weighing in at number two in search results. Now, it comes in at 50 on the fifth page of search results.
Screenshot of a Google search for "browser" after Google lowered its rank to due a mistake in a paid advertising campaign. (Image: Search Engine Land)
Search Engine Land also notes that even Googling “Google Chrome” will provide a download link for Chrome as the top search result with information about the browser as a sub-link instead.
Yesterday, we reported that Google has taken similar action against previous violators of its policy for paid links such as JC Penny, Forbes and Overstock.com. In terms of penalizing itself, we included that Search Engine Land reported in a previous article that Google had banned BeatThatQuote, a Google company, and “reduced [Google Japan's] ability to rank for 11 months], due to similar violations.
[H/T SlashGear]
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COFemale
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 11:39amGive advertisers an inch they will take a mile. Frankly, I don’t use ratings from others too much. You never know what is in the mind of the rater the day they place a ranking on an item. About the only time I do using ratings is on software. It is important when I buy software, it has the features I need and the developer is in good standing with the programming world.
I don’t use Google anymore anyway. I use Firefox.
Report Post »Rowgue
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 11:53amThis isn’t about somebody believing or trusting individual reviewers, it’s about influencing search results by flooding the web with fabricated postings from people paid to do so.
Report Post »Morf01
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 9:26pmWebmasters need to follow all of Google’s guidelines or they risk being delisted from Google and losing their business. Let’s take a look at a few of the other guidelines:
Your site should not consist of other people’s content. It should be full of unique, quality content that you write yourself, just like Google does. Oh wait….
Well for sure if you want to be a great site like google your website should not be a link farm that just consists of a bunch of links to other websites. Oh wait….
But certainly it is important to focus on a topic for your site, like Google does. Make your pages relevant to your topic and don’t have pages about anything and everything on one domain. Oh wait…
Whatever you do, don‘t set up a bot to go out on the internet and grab other people’s content and put it on your site. Google would never do that.
And shame on you for monetizing your site and putting ads on it. great websites like google don’t clutter their content pages with advertisements. Oh wait…
Yeah if you want to see a site that completely ignores Google’s webmaster guidelines, look no further than Google.com.
Report Post »Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 9:54amThis is the same as someone doing something wrong and saying “Bad hand, naughty hand” as if the hand did this on its own.
Report Post »SpankDaMonkey
Posted on January 4, 2012 at 9:51am.
Report Post »Bad Google Sit!!!!!!!!!!!!!……..