http://www.seroundtable.com/google-chrome-penalty-14543.html
As promised, we are back before the end of the week to unpack a little more of this Google penalising Chrome business.
The facts are always handy to know first – Google was caught by some stealthy bloggers in what appeared to be a campaign of articles which promoted their Chrome browser. The campaign was part of one paid for by Google and taken on by a marketing company. The sponsored posts produced included over 400 pages containing ‘thin’ content and ‘paid links’.
The internet giant then took itself to task over the broken rules. They took manual action to demote the Chrome URL linked to and lower the page’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. They stressed that they did not authorise the campaign and that they have taken stricter action against themselves than they would have in a normal website’s case. For more information into Google’s illegal post campaign click here or read our previous blog posting.
Now that we have the background, the question is, what can we learn from this incident? Firstly, Google have penalised themselves. This should at least be reassuring even if they had to be told of their indiscretion.
Secondly, there are cases where those penalised by Google are innocent of their supposed crimes. The internet giant has stressed that they did not authorise the campaign and would they have even needed that campaign to help the Chrome page rank highly? Probably not. So if Google was innocent, others could be too and if these others do not hold the reins to the Search Engine’s main-frame like Google then what happens to those far smaller innocent others? Danny Sullivan put it like this,
‘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?’
If Google was indeed innocent then did they unfairly penalise themselves for some other webmasters mistake? That’s worrying.
And thirdly found on here – A single paid link = single penalty – Google did indeed penalise themselves, or at least the www.google.co.uk/chrome page. Forcing it to drop rankings for generic keywords. However, evidence shows this page https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95346 ranks instead for “chrome”. So, does this mean that when a site receives a penalty it can be sub-folder specific? Apparently so, but is Google being a little soft on themselves?
All in all this is an interesting case and well worth a ponder over.
