startup hustle

The SEO community got all worked up this week when SEO Book and Search Engine Land reported that an advertising campaign by Google for their Chrome browser included links without no follow tags. The assumption was Google is buying links, which is a big no-no, per Google’s webmaster guidelines.

The image above shows a link with the anchor text of “Google Chrome” from one of the paid posts. Google responded to the accusations by claiming that they were buying video advertisements (there is a video lower on the page reference above), and the article that was created had the questionable links added by the authors of the posts. The pages included “This post is sponsored by Google”.

To penalize themselves, as they would any site that got caught with “paid links”, the Google Chrome page no longer ranks for the term “browser”.

I understanding holding someone or a company accountable for rules and standards, especially the same rules they govern, but if this was Google’s attempt to game their own search engine it was pathetic. 

First - the anchor text is bad. Does Google really need to optimize for the name of the browser? No. If the anchor text was “internet browser”, I buy into the evil intentions.

Second – does Google really need more links to the Google Chrome page? Not really. SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer shows that the Chrome homepage is just shy of 2 million links, many from very creditable sites. I understand link building is an ongoing battle but the number of organic links the Chrome site gets every time new market share numbers are announced is substantial.

Third – if Google is willing to cheat by buying links (which is public and can be found), why can’t they just hard code the Chrome pages in the results. Cheating is cheating. If you going to cheat, it would be best to do it behind the scenes.

The one questionable tactic is the content of the posts is not very unique. It is the type of crap that the Panda update was released to clean up.

In the end I think it was a poorly executed campaign by Google and their third-party marketing vendor that was not meant to use paid links to get ahead in the search results. Maybe Google placed the links to help test new algorithm changes to find paid links. Riiiight.