Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome

http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-post-campaign-for-chrome-106348

by kruipen • 15 years ago

235 65 15 years ago

runn1ng2• 15 years ago

This seems very un-Googley to me.

This doesn't mean the article is not correct, but I just can't believe Google would do this kind of grey-hat SEO... mostly, companies do this to outsmart Google. Why would Google be trying to outsmart its own search engine?

corin_2• 15 years ago

Note: I care little about SEO, and I can't tell you if Google is trying to outsmart their own search engine, or, if they are, whether I should care about it.

There is potential legal trouble for them if they were to tweak search results to favour their own properties - that's a pretty solid reason for using SEO tactics to outsmart their own search engine.

yanw3• 15 years ago

Are you a lawyer? would you explain how is it exactly that "tweaking search results" is illegal? because I've noticed that meme going around and I don't think it makes much sense, I'm not saying that they any "tweaking", but if they were to rank whatever they like however they like on their own free website how is that illegal?

ceol• 15 years ago

Doesn't Google already do this? I thought the Google homepage was the only page with a rank of 10 or something.

transburgh• 15 years ago

It's not that Google is trying to outsmart its own search engine, but verifying something that SEOs already know. Paid links still work. Google has not mastered sniffing them out yet. That all assumes that Google is paying for these links in hopes for SEO benefit.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

> This seems very un-Googley to me.

And the bundling deals Chrome had with Skype and has with Adobe seem "Googley" to you?

I really doubt Google would be doing the grey-hat SEO thing myself, but mostly because they have more effective (if more expensive) ways to push Chrome that they've been using already, not because I think Google is incapable of behaving in a completely scummy way. The fact that installing Skype for a while (until Microsoft bought it) defaulted to installing Chrome and making it your default browser pretty much sums up what you can expect out of "Googley" nowadays.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

Update: The search team's response to this shows that thinking of "Google" as a monolithic entity with a monolithic "Googley" attitude or a monolithic "evil" attitude is just wrong, unsurprisingly. Kudos to the search folks; I remain of the opinion that the Chrome marketing folks are fully capable of scummy behavior as desired.

runn1ng2• 15 years ago

All right, that's true. Google Toolbar for IE was also "bundled" similarilly to some software as long as I remember, and the behaviour of Google Updater on Windows is also almost like crapware. You are probably right.

brudgers3• 15 years ago

<snark> Your winnings, sir. </snark>

Zirro3• 15 years ago

To be honest, I fail to understand why Google needs to do this. Chrome is gaining market-share at a very high pace already. Are they targeting a specific group of people in this case, or is this some misdirected effort by a third party advertiser?

melling3• 15 years ago

To answer the specific question about Chrome's growth being "high pace already":

Doing a lot more damage to IE would be good for everyone. Microsoft moves way to slowly and they keep dropping support for older OS's, and they refuse to support WebGL, for example.

IE10, while actually looking impressive, won't run on Vista. XP will have significant market share for at least another 5 years and it's limited to IE8.

In short, I'd like to see Firefox, Chrome, and Opera take another 30% away from Microsoft.

[Updated]

Clearly my comments aren't appreciated. Look at this chart.

http://gs.statcounter.com/

To put it bluntly, Microsoft isn't getting the sh*t kicked out of them fast enough. Post PC, the death spiral of IE, no one buying WinMo7. Sorry guys, some of us have waited a long time for this. :-)

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Microsoft moves way to slowly and they keep dropping support for older OS's

Gee, I wonder why they move so slowly. Do you think it could have something to do with trying to support so many old OS's?

I mean, really. Your cake. You can't have it and eat it.

JS_startup2• 15 years ago

Clearly my comments aren't appreciated.

No, because they were jingoistic and myopic. IE9 is a decent browser (by all measures superior to Firefox) and IE10 looks to be better. Your blind platform hatred is showing.

johnthedebs• 15 years ago

It may be that they're gaining market share so quickly in part because of this advertising.

darkane• 15 years ago

Do you honestly believe that Chrome is gaining significant market share because there is a single, rather uninformative blog post on sites like Telecommuting Mommies and The Debt Princess?

evmar• 15 years ago

Here's a hypothesis that is more generous to Google (I don't know the real reason): some Google campaign that pays per download of Chrome is prompting site owners to generate this low-quality content. It seems more plausible to me than Google paying directly for this, because it's a terrible marketing campaign.

There's an onclick handler on the link to the Chrome download site on the blog that is in the screenshot on that page. I can't figure out what it does, though I did see when I clicked on it that my browser hit some URLs containing the substring "googleadservices", "conversion", and the Chrome download URL.

dholowiski• 15 years ago

Yeah, I bet that's what is happening. I went to this site: http://www.humphriesnation.com/ and clicked on the Google Chrome link, and got sent here: https://www.google.com/chrome/?brand=ECSB&installdataind...

Looks like an affiliate link to me.

FrankBooth• 15 years ago

That seems plausible. However, whatever the true reason is, the end result is that Google is paying people to generate junk content. That's not good for anyone.

GigabyteCoin• 15 years ago

So Google is not allowed to offer incentive for anything? Any sort of affiliate program brings it's share of junk content.

patio11• 15 years ago

Google is paying people to generate junk content

It seems silly to me to get mad at Google for paying, what, ten thousand dollars in affiliate payouts, incentivizing cruddy posts, when they simultaneously collect (and pay out) billions for the ubiquitous AdSense ads which you find on sites which, charitably, span a wide range in terms of content quality.

dmaz• 15 years ago

Google had a similar, but more widespread paid referral program for Firefox with Google Toolbar for a few years.

http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ct...

brudgers3• 15 years ago

Regardless of the theory, Google is not filtering low quality content from which it has the appearance of benefiting...and the apparent double standard being applied, I believe was the point of the original article.

EricBurnett• 15 years ago

Are you suggesting the search algorithm is tailored to detect pro-google content and promote it, or that someone manually altered the rankings for these pages? Both are wildly unlikely. I think the double standard suggested is that these pages shouldn't exist at all, not that anything is biased in their favour.

blasdel• 15 years ago

Bingo -- and the "sponsored by Google Chrome" text was pulled out of the ass of the blogspam originator based on their interpretation of the FTC regulations governing this kind of stuff.

All of the instances are likely the work of a single organization, or possibly the result of cargo-culting by a group of independents in a webmaster forum thread somewhere.

justinschuh• 15 years ago

Linus Upson responded on a public G+ with "News to me. Looking in to it..." https://plus.google.com/113217924531763968801/posts/3XUWkLVN...

kaffeinecoma• 15 years ago

I switched to Chrome about a year ago for its performance, and now I'm about to go back to Safari for exactly the same reason. What happened to Chrome performance on OSX Lion? Why does it scroll like molasses?

stanleydrew• 15 years ago

What does this have to do with the article?

jabo• 15 years ago

That comment was in the spirit of the original article I guess.

nnethercote• 15 years ago

Every discussion about web browsers degenerates into a "which browser is better" flamewar.

ditojim• 15 years ago

i dont have the scrolling issue you describe on os x lion.

jroseattle• 15 years ago

Wow, marketing people in this industry can be sooooo lame sometimes. What a terrible campaign.

Google Chrome is a very good product, and doesn't need to be associated with this type of approach. The product speaks for itself.

manojlds• 15 years ago

Google was banning blogs doing paid reviews from PayPerPost and others. Now they do it themselves...

wes-exp• 15 years ago

Obligatory Steve Jobs reference:

Google's don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.”

jacobwg• 15 years ago

Conspiracy theory - perhaps someone other than Google is running this campaign in order to trigger Google's automatic censoring of the Chrome download page... Pretty stupid attempt if so as Google is not likely to censor its own pages (certainly not for 400 "bad" links), but spammers can be stupid.

kevinalexbrown• 15 years ago

When I read: These days, it’s hard to know who to trust, but with the name Google, you know you are in good hands. I get a stomach-ache. I wonder whether something like this might backfire to some extent, not counting the possible hypocrisy. When you have people writing phrases like that, it almost sounds condescending, like an awkward author's attempt to portray a simple, good-old-fashioned person. Except real, good-old-fashioned people don't actually talk and make decisions like that, and even if they're not familiar with Chrome, they're not going to be persuaded by that. If this is the quality of content from such an SEO campaign, I wonder if such endorsements only work against Chrome in the long run.

OTOH, if the SEO works, then maybe enough people switch to Chrome to justify the crappy endorsements.

dannyr• 15 years ago

Comments are jumping all over Google without a word from the company yet.

I believe Google deserves the benefit of the doubt.

prophetjohn• 15 years ago

I'll be interested to see an explanation for this, but the title is a little on the sensational side. I would say that Google's sponsored post campaign is closer to mildly intriguing than "jaw-dropping."

chintan• 15 years ago

IMO they want to possibly avoid anti-trust issues in future when Chrome becomes the dominant player.

"Look we are teh small guys using plain old paid link marketing"

silentscope• 15 years ago

This was bound to happen in some fashion eventually--it would happen to any company. The question is what will Google do about it. If it's a mea culpa I feel just fine about it. If it's a "no comment" one can hardly ignore the fact that they've gone down the road of filtering your access to information for the worse by making it less open and therefore less informative.

Your move Google.

nestlequ1k• 15 years ago

What an absolutely bullshit article, by a site that only exists to advise people in the fruitless zero sum game that is search engine marketing.

So theres a bunch of idiots out there that are gaming Google's paid campaigns, and Google is indirectly benefiting from it. Outrageous!!

Search Engine land should shut down and find another line of work, something that actually benefits society in the tiniest of ways.

orijing• 15 years ago

So the concern is that this impacts the ranking of Google Chrome in Google Search, and that the FTC is investigating Google for favoring its own content unfairly?

It makes sense in the context of travel websites (Expedia complaining about Google, for example), but I'm not sure about Google Chrome. It's been promoted on the front page of Google many times--so does Google really need the extra boost in its search results?

mmavnn• 15 years ago

Looking at the most recent (at the moment, http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-p...) comment it looks like this is part of a video advertising campaign by Unruly. Apparently (according to Unruly) the video is theirs, but the surrounding text is supplied by the blogger and should use nofollow links.

Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome

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