Google exec comments on the sponsored Chrome campaign and the finger pointing continues

The involved parties all weigh in on the Chrome advertising debacle, including Googler Matt Cutts.

Earlier this week, Google came under fire for a pay-per-post campaign promoting its Chrome browser. In addition to being hypocritical (Google has made a lot of noise about punishing this type of spammy, page boosting, “thin” content), one sponsored blog post in particular failed to follow Google’s “nofollow” hyperlinking rule.

Google dutifully dropped Chrome’s page rank for the next 60 days and in a company statement explained that given its position, the company needs to hold itself to a higher standard.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has also commented on the incident and given us some background on what exactly happened. “Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent results of that,” he says via Google+. “If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.”

Cutts says there was one exception, however, in which a blogger failed to make a link to Chrome “nofollow” and as a result Google has demoted Chrome’s page rank.

Of course it’s not just the fact that one of these paid-for-posts was unwittingly giving Chrome an SEO boost. Google is also taking heat for creating the very type of Web content it tries to bury. According to Cutts, the campaign’s intention was purely “to get people to watch videos—not link to Google.”

One company hired to produce the video ads, Essence Digital, cops to Google’s innocence in the entire situation. “Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kinds of promotions are transparent or are not in the best interests of users,” the company said in a statement. “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.” 

There’s been a lot of finger pointing in this debacle, with most of the blame falling squarely on the shoulders of the unnamed blogger who failed to use the “nofollow” attribute. But it’s all fairly simple: Google says it doesn’t engage with pay-per-post advertising, but it hired a couple of companies (including Unruly Media) which do precisely that. Unruly Media has explained that while it doesn’t tell its writers what to write, it does pay them for it. Still, for all the blame-shifting going on here, at least Google is demoting itself a bit, even if it’s just to appease us all. 

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Google Tablet in Six Months: Schmidt

As the tablet market continues to expand, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt let slip to the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera that the company was planning to directly manufacture tablet devices ?of the highest quality? and mentioned a six-month window for production. Google?s Android operating system is already running the tablets of major manufacturers like Motorola, HTC and Lenovo. The Google tablet would likely be marketed under the company's Nexus brand, which also includes smartphones.

The technology blog DigiTimes posted an article Dec. 26 that quoted unnamed sources in the PC industry in Taiwan as saying that Google?s potential launch of its own tablet could ?cause conflict with branded PC vendors who are cooperating with Google to launch Ice Cream Sandwich-based tablet PCs in the first half of 2012?.

Tablet market leader Apple is rumored to be releasing the third iteration of its iPad tablet in March or April 2012. In the past few months, reports on the Web have indicated that Apple is planning on some sort of higher-resolution display for the next iPad, possibly of the same quality as the ?retina display? currently available in later-model iPhones. The company may also release a small-screen version of the iPad later in 2012.

Amazon's Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet will power the Android platform to 40.3 percent media-tablet market share in the fourth quarter of 2011, up from 32.4 percent in the third quarter, according to IDC. The IT research firm estimated the media-tablet market grew 24 percent on a sequential basis to 18.1 million units.

For an idea of how the tablet market has ballooned, that unit shipment total is higher than the 18 million units sold in all of 2010, according to IDC. Moreover, the market researcher is seeing such strong demand in this quarter that it has boosted its worldwide shipment forecast for 2011 to 63.3 million units, up from its previous tally of 62.5 million units.

One thing is for certain: Google?s proposed tablet and the next iPad will face a somewhat different competitive market than its predecessors. For one thing, Amazon?s newly released Kindle Fire?which runs a customized Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS?has a significant chance of dinging the iPad?s sales, according to some analysts.

?With our expectations for a new iPad launch during the March quarter leading to potentially lower inventory levels combined with increased competition from the $200 Kindle Fire,? T. Michael Walkley, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity, wrote in a Dec. 5 research note, ?we have slightly lowered our December quarter iPad estimates from 14 million to 13 million units.?


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Posted in: Google,Months,Schmidt,Tablet