When a website is in clear violation of Google’s search policies, for example they buy links to boost their presence, the search giant acts swiftly to punish those websites, apparently they are just as quick to punish their own search results when Google itself violates standard search policies.
News of that very occurrence was announced this week after hundreds of bloggers were paid to place Google Chrome sponsored links on their blogs. In most cases the sites contained irrelevant “garbage” content that the search giant typically penalizes sites for engaging in.
Google was quick to blame the ad agency they had hired to promote the browser but then acted on behalf of its own policies.
To punish their own browser the search results for the word “browser” do not contain the homepage for Chrome anywhere in the first 50 results (5 pages).
In a statement about their action to demote their own content a representative noted:
“While Google did not authorize this campaign, and 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.”
It’s still unclear how long Google will leave their down rank in affect, however with thousands of bloggers constantly linking to the browsers pages when new versions are available it probably won’t take long for Google Chrome to climb it’s way back up to the first few results within Google search queries.
Do you think Google did well in punishing itself for violating the company’s search guidelines?
