In the first few days of 2012, the SEO community has gathered to give a great big collective Nelson Muntz-ian ‘HA-HA’ directly in the face of Google as they ended up having to penalise themselves for violating their own guidelines.

In a seemingly misjudged advertising campaign, Google purchased some video ads publicising their Chrome browser.  The media agencies they used to implement this advertising drive attempted to go above and beyond the call of duty by also asking numerous bloggers to show the video on their websites in a series of sponsored blog posts.  This already seemed dubious, but because the videos weren’t flowing PageRank they weren’t in violation of the Google quality guidelines.  However, Matt Cutts and his webspam team, who were investigating the faux pas, found one sponsored post that did link to the Google Chrome website without using the “nofollow” tag, passing PageRank and therefore violating Google’s quality guidelines because it qualified as a paid link.  There’s a phrase about it being inadvisable to defecate on one’s own doorstep that spring to mind to describe this incident…unfortunately I can’t quite remember how it goes.

Anyway, being the wonderfully transparent and thoroughly law abiding company that Google is, they had to penalise themselves or face a severe backlash from other search engine optimisation experts who often feel Google aren’t entirely fair with their distribution of penalisations.  Step forward Matt Cutts, who despite being on holiday in remote Central America, managed to get on the internet long enough to write a Google+ post stating exactly what had happened and how Google were responding.

He seemed to indicate that while the sponsored post campaign was Google’s to advertise Chrome, they hadn’t banked on the media agencies they used, Essence Media and Unruly, paying bloggers to promote their products.  This was confirmed in a statement that Google gave to Danny Sullivan at 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.

Yep, Google really shot themselves in the foot with this one, and as a result they have had to demote the Google Chrome page in the SERPs for a minimum of 60 days.  Following this, someone from the Chrome department at Google can submit a reconsideration request in which they describe how they have cleaned up after the incident, and what they are doing to prevent it occurring again.  This is a similar process that other website owners who incur a penalty have to go through, although they can expect to submit at least three reconsideration requests before they have their appeals heard.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chrome ranking back on the top page quickly after their 60 days is up, but maybe that’s just me being cynical.

The penalisation is already in place, and the official Chrome page is conspicuously absent from high volume search terms such as ‘Chrome’, ‘Browser’, and ‘Internet Browser’.  It has instead been replaced by the Google Chrome installation support page (which itself links directly to the Google Chrome homepage), therefore really limiting the impact of the penalty.  However, Google would need to take into account how this penalty is going to affect search quality, because obviously many users will search for the aforementioned keywords looking to download Chrome.  Obviously, they don’t want to appear to be giving themselves any kind of preferential treatment to if they were an entity external to Google, so they are still walking a bit of a tight rope.

SEOs around the world have been giving their opinion on the matter, with Google’s transparency being both lauded and mocked by those who appreciate Google and those with a chip on their shoulder.  I think the important things is to remember that if Google finds out that businesses are paying directly for links, they will be penalised for at least 60 days with lower rankings in the SERPs.  If you are a client investing in the services of a search engine optimisation agency, it is important to know that the techniques they use won’t get your website penalised.  At SEO Consult, our range of ethical techniques are implemented with complete transparency, ensuring our clients know that we are operating within Google’s quality guidelines.

Get Involved