Google's Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
Google, the company that has been fighting against paid links and “thin” content, seems to be behind a campaign that's generating both on behalf of its Chrome browser. File this under “what were they thinking.” — “This Post Sponsored By Google”
Context & Ripple Effects
Chrome promotion has been escalating for two years: Google aired a "Search Stories" spot during the Super Bowl in February 2010 and followed with a television campaign for the browser in May 2011. The new wrinkle reported by Search Engine Land is that this push now includes sponsored blog posts — labeled "This Post Sponsored By Google" — which produce exactly the paid links and thin content Google's own search team penalizes others for.
The timing compounds an awkward stretch for the company: within the past week alone it pulled a fake official Siri app from Android Market, removed apps by developer Official App after the same incident, and faced criticism that its "Don't be evil" and Android-openness claims ring hollow. A brand built on search-quality enforcement being caught buying links hands critics an easy frame.
First-order effects
- Bloggers who published these Chrome sponsored posts are now holding links that violate Google's own paid-link guidelines, leaving them exposed to ranking penalties from the very company that commissioned the posts.
- Google's web spam and marketing arms are working at cross purposes: every dollar spent on the campaign buys links the search quality team would discount or demote if a competitor bought them.
Second-order effects
- SEO practitioners and webmasters who have absorbed manual penalties for paid links gain a concrete fairness argument against Google's enforcement, pressuring the company to clarify whether its own marketing is exempt.
- Rival browsers and publishers can cite the episode when arguing that Google's search rankings favor its own properties — a tension already visible in the ad products brands loved and hated in Google's 2010 search ad format rollout.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural conflict between Google as search referee and Google as advertiser becomes harder to govern internally, strengthening the case for outside scrutiny of how self-promotion interacts with organic rankings.
- Sponsored-post networks that took Google's money are a reminder that paid-content markets grow wherever budgets flow, regardless of the buyer's stated content standards — a governance problem for any platform policing link quality.
The trend: Browser market-share competition is pushing Google's Chrome marketing into tactics that collide with the search-quality rules it enforces on everyone else.