San Francisco: Google Inc. has decided to downgrade its Chrome browser in Web-search rankings for at least 60 day, after an advertising campaign accidently violated the company’s rule against paid sponsorship and links.
Some of the paid blog posts promoting Chrome several of which contained irrelevant “garbage” text included links to pages where people could download the browser and therefore violated the search engine’s rules around paid links.
The online search giant had commissioned Unruly Media to promote a Chrome video advertisement, across various blogs, as paid featured content.
Essence Digital clarified Google’s role in the matter, that Google only agreed to buy online video ads on the blogs in question. The company later apologized to Google for causing the confusion.
Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, said he found 400 examples of blog posts that Google sponsored. He called the campaign “jaw dropping”.
“Potentially, all this means that Google will have to ban the Google Chrome download page over paid links,” wrote Sullivan, noting that it would be poor timing as Google has been busy running ads for Chrome.
Founder of SEOBook.com, Aaron Wall said that the Google’s remarks were in response to blog posts that made favorable remarks about the Chrome browsing tool and said they were sponsored by Google.
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