Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

While much of the anger makes sense, why do folks keep harping on Google for using 3rd parties for their marketing? I know of no media or marketing company of any reasonable size that doesn't outsource some part of their marketing to another agency or marketing services company. Yes, even agencies outsource some of the work to promote themselves... to an agency.<p>Should Google have more oversight into what they are paying for? Sure, just like everyone who hires a 3rd party to do stuff under their name and aegis. But just because Google have built the technology to run video ads, do we naturally believe that they also have the creative, marketing ops, and other pieces/talent/staff necessary to build, manage, measure, and improve the campaign? Perhaps, but from a resource and efficiency POV, they may find it cheaper to just outsource that to an agency and keep fewer resource in-house for marketing vs., say, engineering.<p>It's ok for companies to purchase services from other companies. Not keeping a close eye on what you've bought, however, is another matter.

Wow, I can't believe they wrung <i>that</i> much text out of such a small issue - tempest in a teapot indeed.<p>Maybe the top 1/4 of the post is actually useful. Google apparently caught "sponsoring" blog posts to promote Chrome. Google denies knowledge, marketing firm admits to doing it without Google approval.<p>The website then spent the next 3/4 of the article trying to invent a conspiracy theory around it, with the author throwing in some choice weasel words to make it seem like outsourced marketing is suspicious behavior.<p>Then more words are spent trying to spin this very common, very simple mistake into a conspiracy theory. Couldn't we have found a better link for this?

What would Google's response be if Microsoft or another product developer had done this? Would they have pages banned?

"In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this."<p>"Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers"<p>Wow, if someone could parse that, I'd be grateful.

Sullivan keeps saying some form of this:<p><i>There’s no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google’s own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice.</i><p>That's not strictly true. PageRank is equally an indication of net <i>inlink</i> significance. Also, both in its original incarnation and via all the black-box tweaks since (like weighting by actual clickstream data), it is highly correlated with overall visits/'eyeballs'.<p>So you could rationally be interested in a site's PageRank even if you were just doing a branding/reach-the-most-readers campaign, and truly were ambivalent about outlinks/link-juice. It's a strong proxy for total viewership.

Plausible, but would Google accept the same excuse from another company facing enforcement action for buying outlinks?

Google is bad. Most intelligent adults agree.