Earlier this week it was revealed that there are literally hundreds of bloggers who were bribed to promote Google Chrome and to claim that their blog’s were “sponsored by Google”. Google’s response has been to point the finger at ad agencies.

Google prides itself on its business integrity, particularly the fact they will not promote links which have been bought or sold that pass PageRank (their in-house algorithm which assigns numerical weighting to links), regardless of quality. However, it seems that that is exactly what the internet giant is guilty of.

Aaron Wall, of SEO Book revealed that a quick search for “This post is sponsored by Google” returned over 400 pages potentially written as part of a Google marketing campaign. Apart from the discovery that a large number of the posts were seemingly written by a computer, they seem to have influenced search results, and in that case would have directly violated Google’s own policies.

When asked to explain themselves, Google defected charges and diverted attention to ad agencies that they had hired, amongst those it blamed were Unruly and Essence Digital. Google issued the following statement:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

Regardless of these claims, surely the world’s biggest search engine operator would know what they were getting themselves into and would have a better understanding of their own rules? Come now Google, you can’t really expect us to believe your absolute innocence.

[Source: SEO Land and SEO Book]