A Happy New Year from everyone here at a451! However, it seems that not everyone has started off the New Year happy, or at least, they’re not happy anymore. It appears that all Google got for Christmas was coal after they actually managed to break their own rules!
Yes, that’s right. Google, the monopoliser of Search and all-round American web giant has got itself into a spot of bother when attempting to follow its own rules. Of course, like a good search engine, they are penalising themselves as a result of the rule breaking. Google said –
‘We believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site…’
The penalty they are suffering comes after they sponsored posts for a marketing campaign on behalf of its Chrome browser which contained both ‘thin’ content and ‘paid links’. The penalty will last up to 60 days, demoting the page which had paid links pointing to it along with a lowering of the page’s Page-Rank.
The ‘thin’ content and ‘paid links’ are both objects of Google’s wrath when other site’s use them in order to gain page rank and to rank higher in results. ‘Paid links’ are considered bad by Google because if a site is quality and contains quality content then it should not have to pay for links which lead to it. As for ‘thin content’, Google’s recent Panda update was designed for the prime purpose of penalising websites which used duplicate content. That’s two pretty big rules of Google’s which it has broken itself and this raises an interesting question, as Danny Sullivan puts it –
‘It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?’
Of course, it can be easy just to say, ‘serves them right’ and cross our arms smugly but perhaps it would be wiser to think about what questions this incident raises like the above – Have a think and we’ll be back later this week to unpack the Google Chrome debacle further.
