Google May Have Violated Its Own Paid Link Policy with Chrome Campaign

Google is big and it's getting bigger. It has its hands in everything online and it's looking to spread itself even more. It shouldn't be particularly surprising then that its interests sometimes conflict and that different parts of Google find themselves at odds.

This seems to be happening with a marketing campaign for Google Chrome. Google or rather the company running the campaign for Google has been paying bloggers and such to write about Google Chrome.

There is no official confirmation of the campaign, but there are plenty of posts embedding a certain video, a Google Chrome ad, and talking about what the browser can do for small businesses.

The posts specify that they're being sponsored by Google. As you can expect, the posts aren't very heavy on content and few actually say anything specific about Google Chrome.

In the best cases, they purely focus on ways the web can help small businesses and similar things and they're not very informative about what makes Chrome better/different. Then again, Google doesn't do such a great job at that in its own ads.

Paying to have the web filled with garbage is nothing new and it's what Google's series of "Panda" updates has been trying to combat.

But it gets worse because some of these 'reviews' contain links to Google Chrome download page that do not include the 'nofollow' attribute. In Google's own rulebook, that's a big no-no, and the search engine has penalized plenty of sites for this behavior.

Normally, Google either removes the sites in questions from its results or makes it impossible for them to rank for a period after they've been penalized.

It's unclear what Google will do in this case. It could argue that those linking to the download page did it on their own accord and were not instructed to do this. But that defense hasn't helped too many other websites.

If it applies the same standards to itself that it does to others, the Google Chrome download page will be removed from the search results or at least from the top results. Google has done this before with its own Google Japan.