
Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome - kruipen
http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-post-campaign-for-chrome-106348
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evmar
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.

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FrankBooth
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.

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patio11
_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.

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danilocampos
I think the problem isn't that they're doing both of those things at the same
time. The problem, instead, is that the third thing they're doing at the same
time is issuing guidelines, (hopefully?) backed by their ranking algorithm,
written specifically to combat this type of behavior.

If it were a free-for-all, sure, no problem. But Google doesn't want other
parties doing this. Doing it themselves puts them in a position that's a
little difficult to explain.

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runn1ng
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?

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corin_
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.

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yanw
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?

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pork
They are the dominant player in a large market (online advertising). If they
exploit the dominance of their product specifically to stifle competition, we
have a Microsoft-esque situation where the question might have been "how
exactly is integrating an additional piece of freely available software with
our market-dominant operating system illegal?" Well, it was, and this might
very well be as well.

~~~
yanw
I'm not talking about ads I'm talking about ranking, and not even that, as
ranking links doesn't really strike me as the way of the future, I'm referring
to when Google shows a map for a location query and flight prices and
schedules for a flight query as these are also search results and they are
more useful (and prettier) so not only do I find nothing wrong with it but I
find it to be the right way to go.

Also regarding that antitrust meme the Microsoft comparison keep getting
mention, I'm not really familiar with that case but as I see it, Windows you
buy and you are stuck with, Google on the other hand is free to use or not as
you please.

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JS_startup
The "stickiness" of Microsoft's products had nothing to do with the anti-trust
case, They were leveraging their dominance in one market to exploit another;
the permanence of the product has nothing to do with the illegality of their
actions.

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ameen
Isn't that what Google exactly did whilst promoting Google Chrome? Any search
for the string "browser" turns up a Chrome ad. Some would argue that this is
relatively an anti-competitive stance.

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kevinalexbrown
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.

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jroseattle
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.

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Zirro
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?

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melling
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. :-)

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sliverstorm
_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.

~~~
Zirro
That argument would work unless the competitors were supporting the same old
OS-versions too, plus (in most cases) at least two other platforms.

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prophetjohn
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."

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mmavnn
Looking at the most recent (at the moment,
[http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-
sponsored-p...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-
post-campaign-for-chrome-106348#comment-21563)) 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.

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silentscope
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.

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

I believe Google deserves the benefit of the doubt.

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

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jacobwg
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.

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orijing
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?

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chintan
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"

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wes-exp
Obligatory Steve Jobs reference:

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

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

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nestlequ1k
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.

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kaffeinecoma
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?

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stanleydrew
What does this have to do with the article?

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

