Google punishes itself for spammy sponsored posts promoting Chrome

Search Engine Land
Google has downgraded the PageRank for its Chrome home page so that it’s now buried in search results for the phrase “Web browser” and similar terms. The company decided to punish itself after a site called SEO Book discovered a number of low-value blog posts that praised Chrome, including a video about the browser and links to download it. The links violated Google’s guidelines against paid links. Google said it intended to buy video ads, not links. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan sizes up what happened: “The bigger issue in all this, as I wrote before, is that the campaign produced a lot of garbage content. That doesn’t mean that Google Chrome gets banned. Rather, it’s just embarrassing to Google, when it has [been] busy trying to prevent this type of content from ranking in its own search engine.”