Search giant Google will punish itself for violating its own advertising policy – the company is going to drop the search ranking of the Chrome website for 2 months. The reason was that Google paid hundreds of bloggers to claim this Internet browser was the best.

A number of the paid blog posts featured cut and paste "garbage" text, containing links to the pages where Internet users were able to download the web browser. Meanwhile, if any other company did the same, it would have been banned from the search engine index for at least a month and up to a year. However, Google made an exception for Chrome.

It seems that Google is now blaming Chrome's advertising companies, though it claimed today that it would now reduce the page ranking of the browser home page as a punishment. The search giant made some updates to its algorithm in order to penalize websites offering so-called "thin" content and thus reducing their search rankings. Nevertheless, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land managed to find 400 examples of blog posts sponsored by the search engine.

According to media reports, links to sites mentioned in sponsored posts should have included the so-called "nofollow" tag, i.e. they weren’t meant to be used to determine a site's ranking on the Google index. Thus far, it’s the 3rd time that the company has banned one of its own acquired companies –in 2011, BeatThatQuote.com was also banned for infringing its search guidelines, as well as Google Japan has been
punished for paid posts as well. Meanwhile, a digital media agency working with the search giant on the campaign, UK’s Essence Digital, claimed that Google hadn’t known about a sponsored-post campaign, though the company agreed to purchase online video adverts.

Source: Extratorrent.com