Google Walks Its Talk and Penalizes Itself

If you haven’t been following the news lately, this week there was a heated discussion about a marketing campaign that Google carried out to promote its Chrome browser. Basically Google hired a marketing company to promote some web videos, and that company in turn hired bloggers to post the videos (obviously paying them). The problem emerged with some SEOs noticed the campaign and found a couple of those bloggers using dofollow links to the Chrome homepage, which in theory if a violation of Google’s guidelines.

The whole story can be found on this Search Engine Land post: Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome.

Anyway after the controversy was out there many people started asking (some demanding…) whether or not Google would penalize its own website for the sponsored link violation.

Guess what? Google did it.

The Chrome homepage used to be the first or second result for the term “browser”, but if you search for it now you probably won’t find it anywhere on the first page. Here’s Google’s statement about the case:

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.

In my opinion Google is actually coming out stronger out of the whole debacle. For one thing it’s giving out a signal that no one is special when it comes to search rankings and penalties, and that it’s willing to walk its talk.