Google’s Sponsored Post Campaign ⇥

Yesterday, Search Engine Land uncovered something of a double standard that Google was engaged in. Sponsored blog posts were previously marked as spam, as they were often disguised as reviews or helpful advice.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn’t be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm.

And yet here, we see one of Google’s sponsored post doing exactly that.

The arrow points to a link leading to the Google Chrome download page. This is a straight link, not blocked with nofollow. It only appears in this post because the post is part of a sponsored campaign by Google, as noted at the bottom of the page. Therefore, both the author and Google itself are in violation of Google’s guidelines and risk being banned by Google.

This elicited a vocal response across a number of sites that covered this post, accusing Google of double standards and favouritism towards their own services, the very claims they’re denying in their European antitrust case. This wasn’t the first time Google had used referral links — they used a similar campaign to get people to download the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Despite this, some thought that Google had simply been caught in some sort of spam faux campaign, or were otherwise innocent. Commenting on Google+ yesterday, the VP of the Chrome team Linus Upson said that this was news to him, and that he was looking into it.

Today, Google has admitted that the sponsored post campaign was theirs, but said that they thought they were just buying ads:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

The excellent post dissects the many layers of where this went wrong.