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.<p>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.
This seems very un-Googley to me.<p>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?
When I read: <i>These days, it’s hard to know who to trust, but with the name Google, you know you are in good hands.</i> 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.<p>OTOH, if the SEO works, then maybe enough people switch to Chrome to justify the crappy endorsements.
Wow, marketing people in this industry can be sooooo lame sometimes. What a terrible campaign.<p>Google Chrome is a very good product, and doesn't need to be associated with this type of approach. The product speaks for itself.
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?
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."
Looking at the most recent (at the moment, <a href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-post-campaign-for-chrome-106348#comment-21563" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-p...</a>) 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.
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.<p>Your move Google.
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.
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?<p>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?
IMO they want to possibly avoid anti-trust issues in future when Chrome becomes the dominant player.<p>"Look we are teh small guys using plain old paid link marketing"
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.<p>So theres a bunch of idiots out there that are gaming Google's paid campaigns, and Google is indirectly benefiting from it. Outrageous!!<p>Search Engine land should shut down and find another line of work, something that actually benefits society in the tiniest of ways.
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?