It appears that Google has been caught doing paid links again.
Our friend Aaron Wall at SEOBook has found some examples of an apparent “‘series’ of advertorials” for Google products like AdWords, Google Analytics, Chromebooks, and Hangouts. He points to content from The Globe And Mail and Edutopia that claim to be “brought to you by Google” and “sponsored by Chromebooks” respectively. He points to a handful of questionable links within the content.
“None of those links in the content use nofollow, in spite of many of them having Google Analytics tracking URLs on them,” he writes. “And I literally spent less than 10 minutes finding the above examples & writing this article. Surely Google insiders know more about Google’s internal marketing campaigns than I do. Which leads one to ask the obvious (but uncomfortable) question: why doesn’t Google police themselves when they are policing others? If their algorithmic ideals are true, shouldn’t they apply to Google as well?”
As you may recall, Google got some attention last year for a very similar situation, which it blamed on a different firm, who was working on its behalf. Google ultimately penalized its Chrome landing page in search results, and left it in the penalty box for the requisite “at least 60 days“.
While Google has yet to comment directly on this particular case, it seems likely that it will follow a similar path. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land shares this statement from the company:
We’ll investigate this report just as we would a report about any other company, and take the same action we would for any other company.
As Sullivan notes, this is far from the first time Google itself has engaged in paid links. Even before last year’s Chrome incident there were other cases.
“Google’s also penalized Google Japan in 2009 for paid links, its AdWords help area for cloaking in 2010, and the BeatThatQuote service it acquired in 2011 was penalized on day it was purchased over spam violations,” he writes.
The timing of this new discovery is quite interesting. Google just (apparently) slapped UK flower seller Interflora for paid links, along with the newspaper sites who had the “advertorials”. Google did not specifically comment on this, but “randomly” put up a generic post about selling links that pass PageRank on its Webmaster Central blog just over that situation got some media coverage.
In Google’s post, Matt Cutts wrote, “Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or ‘advertorial’ pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.”
It will be interesting to see how Google proceeds with the series Wall has brought to the forefront, and if Google comments directly on the situation.
Image: Aaron Wall