Did Google Break its Own Terms of Service? - Paid Links Bad, Thin Content Worse
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That's not the part that bothered Sullivan the most, however. “Google's paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize,” he observed. He quoted one post in detail, noting that it never mentioned Google Chrome or how it helped small business, despite its headline: “Google Chrome Helping Small Business.” It was hardly the only Chrome-related post that came up thin on content. Even “reviews” offered no meat and all fluff. Sullivan summarizes thusly: “Google's paid for a content-light post that's not a review of Google Chrome, nor a review of how Google Chrome helps small business, pushing a video that also doesn't show how Google Chrome helps small businesses.”
Did Google really intend to do this? Apparently not; you might even say that Google learned the hard way what JC Penney went through. In a follow-up post, Sullivan reported that yes, these posts were part of a Google campaign, but it didn't think it was signing up for this kind of campaign. In its statement to Sullivan, Google said that it “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.”
So how could this happen? Well, Google apparently contracted with Essence Digital, which said (or at least implied) in a statement (on Google+, appropriately enough) that Google agreed to buy online video ads with them, but never approved a sponsored-post campaign. Sullivan found the idea that Google would need to contract with Essence Digital to run the ads “really weird” – after all, Google has its own video ad network. Why would it need to use someone else to place the ads?
Here's the icing on the cake: Essence Digital didn't even actually set up the campaign. Sullivan was contacted by one of the bloggers, who told him where she got connected to the campaign. It looks like video promotion company Unruly reached out to bloggers through ads in certain online communities offering pay-per-post opportunities. Sullivan didn't find an ad for making a paid post for Google Chrome, but he did find Unruly ads for other campaigns. The offers “asked that bloggers watch a video and decide if they wanted to do a post about it, saying whatever they wanted, and embed the video on their blog. Payment was $40 in Amazon gift card credit” in each of the ads Sullivan found. Sullivan also found wording in Unruly's sign-up terms that “suggests that Unruly is indeed running campaigns with the intention of gaining better search rankings through paid links.”
As the third party in this debacle, Unruly's existence in the chain gives Google a bit of wiggle room. Google can always say they didn't expect or condone this kind of campaign. But JC Penney could make a similar excuse, and still saw its site penalized. The court's still out as to whether Google will cut Chrome with the same sword (and penalties) it meted out to others. Since it has done that before, though, it would look downright hypocritical if it didn't in this case.
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