Updated: According to a number of reports, Google has been promoting its Chrome browser through a sponsored-post marketing campaign that appears to break — or at least bend — many of the search company’s own rules about “good” web content. The web giant has also come under fire recently for removing a Google+ avatar belonging to TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler, which was apparently judged to be offensive, even though similar content routinely appears in search results. As Google tries to move farther away from being just a search company, it continues to trip over its own feet.
The Chrome promotion, which was first highlighted by SEO Book, involves sponsored blog posts that link to the company’s browser download page and also include a video about Chrome’s supposed benefits for small businesses. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land notes, the campaign is a great example of the kind of spammy, low-quality content that Google has repeatedly declared war on via tweaks to its algorithms — including the recent Panda update, which penalized sites such as the New York Times-owned About.com and “content farm” Demand Media for their mediocre content. As Sullivan puts it:
That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.
The company that Google contracted to run the campaign said the Chrome promotion is a fairly standard program, and that one sponsored post which included a link without the “no follow” tag — a key requirement made by Google so that sites don’t try to game its algorithm in order to achieve a higher Page Rank — was simply a mistake. But even so, the fact that the entire campaign seems intended to deliver spammy results from sites to boost Chrome’s profile makes it look like a perfect example of the kind of content that Google keeps penalizing everyone else for producing. So will Chrome be penalized in search results the way others have been?
Update: Google has told Search Engine Land that it will lower the PageRank of the Google Chrome page for at least 60 days as a result of the marketing campaign.
Does Google delete offensive content or not? That depends
In the MG Siegler incident, the TechCrunch blogger included a humorous profile picture on his Google+ account with his middle finger extended, and then wrote about how this avatar was removed by Google for breaching its rules. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson argued that this was perfectly understandable, and that social networks need to make these kinds of judgements so that they don’t “turn into a cesspool… sorta like MySpace was,” but others — including author Jeff Jarvis — said Google was playing a dangerous game by excluding some forms of content, since this slippery slope could lead to concerns about its search results as well.
Those search results in turn could be part of the reason why Google is so concerned about Google+ content, as Danny Sullivan notes. Since pages — and avatars — from the social network are now showing up prominently in search, as Google integrates its new offering into all of its properties, the company is undoubtedly a lot more interested in controlling what kind of content appears. And yet, as Siegler pointed out, photos almost identical to the one he posted appear in Google’s search results all the time.
These two incidents may seem silly or inconsequential, and in many ways they are. After all, who cares whether MG Siegler has a photo of himself giving people the finger on his Google+ profile? And the Chrome campaign could just be a sloppy marketing program that was outsourced to the wrong company. But they both highlight for me how Google is trying to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to force other content producers to adhere to the purest standards, but apparently makes an exception when it comes to marketing its own products, and it seems to have one principle for content on its own social network and another for content in its search results.
The reality is that attempting to manage multiple lines of business that in some cases conflict with each other — like the world’s dominant search engine and a growing social network — is going to be an ongoing problem for the company, regardless of what happens in these two specific cases. If Google isn’t careful, they could even become part of a much bigger problem: namely, the antitrust investigation into the company’s behavior around search results and favoritism towards its own properties.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Woodley Wonder Works
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