the-advertising

Google demotes itself after paid-blog fuss

Google has fallen on the proverbial sword – demoting itself in search rankings after a Chrome ad campaign violated the company’s own policies. Google has found itself in hot water following the revelation that a Google Chrome ad campaign did exactly what the company has specifically banned in the past – paying bloggers for links to pad out search results. To add insult to injury, the posts were of such low quality that they embodied the kind of “thin” content that Google has been working to eliminate from its search results. So, to make amends it appears the search giant will be turning to a little self-flagellation of the corporate kind. “We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com / chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days,” the company said in a statement from Mountain View. “We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users..

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Google demotes itself after paid-blog fuss