Google appears to have hit some controversy as it has been uncovered by Search Engine Land and SEO Book that the search giant looks to have employed paid links to promote its browser, Chrome. Selling text links without the “nofollow” attribute like this is explicitly against how Google’s ideas of how linking should work.
Google has been caught in the act before and has search penalised some of its own properties including Google Japan and BeatThatQuote, but those campaigns were not as easily found as simply typing “sponsored by Google Chrome” into Google itself. It currently returns about 400 results which were sponsored in this manner.
For its part, Google has claimed that it did not have any knowledge of any such paid link campaign and has laid the blame squarely on PR firm Unruly Media – the company the paid to buy “online ads”, and Unruly CEO, Scott Button, has noted his company’s mistake. Although he claims to know only one link that wasn’t “nofollowed” and there seems to be quite a few more than that…
Whether Google will now feel it has to penalise its Chrome download page in the search results for such a mishap is yet to be seen.
[via Search Engine Land and SEO Book]