Google Punishes Chrome for 60 days for violating Google Rules

[Carbon]

Google is putting Chrome, its own Web browser, in the search-results timeout corner for the next 60 days.

The crime? Apparently the company broke its own quality guidelines and paid bloggers for links in order to improve search rankings. The blog Search Engine Land, which helped break the story, has more on what the campaign entailed and how it happened.
The punishment imposed on Chrome will significantly lower the results ranking of the main download page for the browser. Google regularly punishes sites who violate the company's quality guidelines in order to get a favorable treatment from their search analysis algorithm, PageRank. The practice of gaming the rankings is often referred to as Black Hat SEO, and it's something Google has publicly worked hard to combat.

Some of these penalties are high-profile: last year, the New York Times published an expose of JC Penney's mystifying ability to appear at the top of many relevant and semi-relevant search results. JC Penney was punished, but not before making it through a holiday shopping season with the top search spot.*
As the Washington Post notes, a search for "browser" in Google doesn't pull up Chrome in the top results anymore.
Here's how Google responded to the embarrassing gaffe, in a statement sent to Search Engine Land:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We?re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.
The Post explains that Matt Cutts and his Google webspam team found one sponsored blog post that broke the rules, prompting the demotion. Chrome will be able to submit a reconsideration request, Cutts explained, "just like any other company would."

But Google seems to be using itself to set an example. An updated statement from Tuesday night reads, "We believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."
As CNET notes, this actually isn't the first time Google has punished itself for violating the guidelines. Previously, Google Japan was demoted in rankings after it hired a company to pay bloggers to write about Google features.

Source: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/...log_posts.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...GaP_story.html

Carbon Reviewed by Carbon on 6th Jan 2012. Google Punishes Chrome for 60 days for violating Google Rules Source: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2012/01/04/google_chrome_punished_60_day_penalty_for_sponsored_blog_posts.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-punishing-chrome-for-60-days/2012/01/04/gIQADMPGaP_story.html Rating: 5

[RT]

lol that is epic, nice share!

[shanit]

Really nice share

Thanks

[Djlatino]

Wait so why did they do this? In a nutshell...

[Mr Happy]

Wait so why did they do this? In a nutshell...

Google hired an advertising company to promote it's youtube video. That company hired blogers to promote the video. Some blogers in their topics linked to the Chrome Download page in their posts. As the blogers were paid any links should really be nofollow but they weren't.

Media and SEO people complained and it went viral 2 days ago and Google punished the page yesterday. They had to really from a public relations point of view as they couldn't beseen to be breaking their own rules.

It's not really Google's fault. Sure they could have checked more what the Advertising company were doing but really it's the advertising companys fault as their guidelines to the bloggers weren't accurate. If you hire and pay a company $25 million you don't expect them to fuck up. If I paid an advertising company that much I'd be pretty pissed at them.

If you search "browser" chrome used to be #2 but now it's #50.

[Djlatino]

Thanks Mr Happy, Makes more sense to me.