Google has fallen on the proverbial sword - demoting itself in search rankings after a Chrome ad campaign violated the company's own policies. Google has found itself in hot water following the revelation that a Google Chrome ad campaign did exactly what the company has specifically banned in the past - paying bloggers for links to pad out search results.
To add insult to injury, the posts were of such low quality that they embodied the kind of "thin" content that Google has been working to eliminate from its search results.
So, to make amends it appears the search giant will be turning to a little self-flagellation of the corporate kind.
"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," the company said in a statement from Mountain View.
"We strive to enforce Google's webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users... 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."
Google notoriously dislikes companies trying to game search results by paying other sites to link to them, and is partly blaming the advertising companies it partnered with for the fracas.
"Google never agreed to anything more than online ads," said the company. "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 are now looking into what changes we need to make to ensure this never happens again."
Searching for the keyword "browser" on Google will no longer bring up the Google Chrome home page anywhere in the top results, with it reportedly currently ranked in position 50.
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Source: http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/google-demotes-itself-after-paidblog-fuss-.asp/8783/
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