The search engine guilty of buying links via blog posts sponsored, has delisted the site of its Chrome browser.
Google has punished the site of its own browser, Chrome: it will be delisted from its search engine for 60 days. This preposterous is the epilogue of the controversy earlier this year on the Internet. In recent days, several sites that specialize in SEO have found a promotional campaign for Chrome hundreds of U.S. blogs. Advertising of posts had been purchased and were marked « this post is sponsored by Google Chrome. » So far nothing illegal, the practice is very common … Except that the bloggers involved have themselves introduced links to the site to download Chrome. The practice could then be compared to the purchase of bonds, bypassing the own sponsored links of Google! Matt Cutts, head of listing at Google, had himself named this practice as spam a few months ago.
400 pages concerned
Chrome Trust and the top positions of several queries. In total, over 400 pages were concerned. Google and filter Panda, the update algorithm of the search engine supposed to fight against spam and duplicate content, seemed ineffective in this case … Google teams have therefore acknowledged their fault, but said they had gone through two agencies to orchestrate the promotional campaign of Chrome, Essence Digital and Unruly. The « page rank » of Chrome is penalized for two months and the download site of the browser no longer appears in the first pages of results for certain queries such as « browser », « browser » and even « Chrome ». Google, however, continues to buy sponsored links to support its product, and it therefore continues to appear in advertisements of the engine.
A key product for Google
This is not the first time that Google penalizes itself. In 2009, the Japanese site engine had undergone the same treatment for the same reasons. The case fell bad for Chrome, a product that Google relies heavily and invested millions of dollars in advertising (including traditional media, press, billboards, television, on which it was not this far). The browser is indeed the main gateway to the Web to Internet users, and publishers have extensive data on their navigation. Thanks to the efforts of communication, the browser Google has become in a few months as a leading challenger to Internet Explorer and would be elbow to elbow with Firefox in several countries. The various specialized firms already assigned to it between 10 and 25% market share in growth. The case also shows how difficult it becomes for the Web giant to manage its various activities.
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