It’s Not Your Imagination

Apparently, I’m not the only one. I can see others on Twitter complaining about it:

Here’s Andrew Chen:

When I google, the “Welcome to Search plus your World” shows up over and over. Can’t be dismissed. wtf

Jonathan Dugan:

Google, if you keep spamming me with “Welcome to Search plus Your World” every time I run a search, I’m going to stop using your service

Stryder Crown:

“Welcome to Search plus Your World” I get it, I get I get I GET IT I GET IT! NOW PLEASE GO AWAY!!! When did you become like this??

The Promos

When Search Plus Your World launched in January, Google showed these messages to help alert people about the new service. The promo then looked like this:

We’re now three months into the launch, but for some reason, Google’s apparently decided everyone need a reminder about it. At least two slightly different promos are now running. There’s this one that I initially saw and which Chen posted:

There’s also this, which I saw when doing further searches. I’ve also shown how it appeared just above my first search result:

Dismissed, Yet It Returns

The promos all have a little X button to the right to dismiss them. That’s the surprising thing. I clicked on this when I saw the first promo. Then when I searched again, the second version appeared despite having been dismissed. Curious, I searched again, and the promo still appeared. But then after another search, it finally was gone.

My guess is that Google has decided to show the promotion to everyone signed-in to Google, perhaps even if they’ve dismissed it the first time, for a maximum of three views. I’m checking on this and will post more, if I hear back.

Postscript (11:00 PM ET): Google tells me this was a bug that’s now fixed. Once dismissed, the message shouldn’t return.

Now if you search for [chrome], [browser] or similar searches, the Google Chrome landing page will once again show up on the first page of the search results.

Here is a picture showing the page ranking in position number for on Google:

As you may remember, right after the New Years, Google was caught running a sponsored post campaign for Chrome. After a day or so, Google’s Matt Cutts applied a link penalty to the Google Chrome landing page for 60 days. Now, about days later, Google lifted the penalty.

A Google representative confirmed the penalty has been lifted.

Google told us in January:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Hat tip to Tamir Oron from SEO Israel.

Related Stories:

• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty
• What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

Google Seeks Transparency

In Google’s case, I view the Search Quality Highlights series as Google trying to deal with accusations, especially by those on the anti-trust front but even from places like the New York Times, that Google Search is some type of black box that’s all designed simply to favor Google’s own properties.

Of course, Google said nothing so explicit when it launched its series last December. Rather, it spoke generally about being transparent:

 For years now we’ve been blogging about significant algorithmic updates like Panda and our recent freshness update. So, why do we need yet another blog series?

We’ve been wracking our brains trying to think about how to make search even more transparent. The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share.

With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own.

The series actually had a soft-launch last November, before being formalized in December. Since then, we’ve been getting a monthly laundry-list of changes that Google’s made to its search algorithms, changes that weren’t deemed big enough to warrant their own blog posts by Google, though some might disagree.

For example, in Google’s latest post at the end of February, Google announced the latest of its Panda Updates (anything Panda is generally big news), that it had dropped a method of link analysis (sparking all types of discussions among SEO folks about what was dropped) and added that its SafeSearch algorithm had been changed to make “irrelevant adult content” less likely to appear.

That SafeSearch change was directly responsible for causing searches on “santorum” at Google to no longer show a long-standing site defining “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex. It was a big change, worth of its own blog post I’d say, but instead it was relegated to being a bulletpoint.

Still, at least we did know some of the things going on, which is welcomed. And now we’re going to know more from Bing.

Bing Goes After Visiblity

Over at Bing, we’re told:

Today we are launching a new blog series we’re calling “Bing Search Quality Insights” aimed at giving you deeper insight into the algorithms, trends and people behind Bing.

This blog is the first in a series that will take you behind the search box for an up close view into the core of the Bing search engine.

Quality improvements in Bing are often subtle but often those little changes are the result of years of research. In the coming weeks and months, you will hear from members of my team on a range of topics, from the complexities of social search and disambiguating spelling errors to whole page relevance and making search more personal.

We will also highlight the ideas and projects we have collaborated with colleagues from Microsoft Research and academia to advance the state of the art for our industry. We hope this will not only be useful information for our blog readers, but that they will spark conversations that help us all move the search industry forward.

Unlike Google, Bing doesn’t really have an anti-trust transparency issue to deal with. Rather, Bing has an invisibility issue. Bing seems largely invisible to those who are wanting to search the web. Bing can (and does) have some of the same problems that will launch a million blog posts about Google. But no one cares, if they happen on Bing.

As for consumers in general, while Bing has grown its market share, that’s come mainly by pulling people away from Bing’s partner Yahoo, not from Google. Perhaps the new series will help focus more attention from consumers on Bing, which would be good. Bing’s an excellent search engine that should be considered.

Bing’s First Post Helps Google

Ironically, the first post in Bing’s series — about “Whole Page Relevance” — will also help Google on the anti-trust front. It explains how Bing “blends” results from its vertical search engines like Bing Video, Bing News, Bing Maps and Bing Images along with web listings and direct answers through a system called “Answer Ranking.”

Google does exactly the same thing, though a system it calls “Universal Search.” Google’s system has come under intense pressure over the past two years as somehow “favoring” Google over its competitors, including attacks by Microsoft-backed FairSearch.

Now we’ve got a blog post from Microsoft explaining how it does exactly what Google does, something both Google and third-parties such as myself have pointed out already. That makes it harder for some to attack Google over Universal Search, especially when Microsoft finally puts a name to what its own system is called.

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Google said even though it felt there were no “remaining violations” of its guidelines, the search engine’s spam fighting team was going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page, which in turn lead to today’s ranking decrease.

From the statement Google sent us:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.

We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Lower PageRank Value Doesn’t Equal Banning

At the time the statement was originally sent, around 1:30 PT today, the page had a publicly-reported PageRank value of 9. The highest you can have is 10.

One tool I used reported the non-https version of the page as having a PageRank of zero. Another check with the Google Toolbar shows it still at 9. However, it’s common that PageRank values shown to the public may be behind, sometimes months behind, the scores that Google is actually using.

Lowering the PageRank value is not the same as removing or banning the page from Google. Potentially, however, a lower PageRank value will reduce its ability to rank well for certain terms. That’s what’s happened as a result of this.

Will It Still Rank?

When the statement was initially received, the Chrome home page still ranked for searches on chrome, google chrome and the generic term of browser, as you can see below:

I wrote in the earlier version of this story:

Chances are, even with the PageRank reduction, the page will continue to rank for these terms. However, if it were to fall out of the first page of results for “browser,” or to something lower than its current number two position that I see, then the penalty will have had some real teeth….

If that penalty doesn’t cause some type of ranking reduction, then it’s not really much of a penalty at all. The separate issue of Google’s campaign creating garbage posts remains, but that’s a penalty that’s typically applied to the garbage post themselves.

No, It Will Not

Now that has happened for a search on “browser,” as you can see below:

That’s the first page of results for “browser” on Google now. Previously, Chrome has been ranked number two. Now you have to go to the fifth page of results to find it, ranked in position 50:

NOTE: Only about a half-hour after writing this, we’ve also seen the page sink to as low at 73.

In fact, the page no longer ranks for “chrome” or for “chrome browser,” either. Instead, of the Chrome home page that looked like this showing up first:

It’s the Chrome installation help page that gets top billing:

The main download page does still make it in the top results, but it has been demoted in both cases to “sitelink” status as you can see here:

John Doherty emailed me that he’d run some ranking checks on other terms before the change happened. Here’s the shift from what he recorded to what I see now:

• internet browser, dropped from 5th to 58th
• web browser, dropped from 4th to 54th

A Solid Slap

Overall, only one page in the sponsored post campaign was ever spotted with a “straight” link that passed credit to the Chrome page. It also didn’t seem as if the campaign overall was designed to help Chrome rank for any particular terms. It was doing fine on its own before this happened.

But technically, even that single link was enough to make Google guilty of buying paid links, even if it happened because of two different agencies being involved. Minor technical violation or not, I’d say Google applied a solid penalty against itself, one that should last for at least 60 days.

But If Google Can’t Figure Things Out…

To me, the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage content that was produced by the campaign, “thin” material that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results. I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.

Given how much detail Google professes to put into its marketing, as I covered yesterday, it still remains amazing that the company found itself involved with this type of campaign.

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

I hate to write that, because the last thing I want is for a Google screw-up to be an excuse for anyone to do the type of “marketing” that Google did. But it’s also true.

Postscript: The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has shared some comments on Google+ though he’s on vacation. He confirms that the video player links didn’t pass any link credit, but because they found at least one non-video player link that did, that was deemed sufficient to take action against Google. From his post:

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.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

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Google: We Only Meant To Buy Online Ads

Google has sent me this 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.

That seems odd, at first, because it has become clear that Google was behind a campaign that paid bloggers to promote its Chrome product. Otherwise, the web wouldn’t be littered with all these posts that say “This post sponsored by Google.”

Essence Digital: Google Thought They Were Buying Video Ads

The email I received from Google also pointing to a statement from Essence Digital, a New York/London digital media agency. The statement:

There’s been some recent attention in the news involving a Google campaign (see linked article). Here’s some context on what happened.

We want to be perfectly clear here: 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 kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

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.

In other words, Google seems to have contracted with Essence Digital to have a video ad campaign be run across the web. Apparently, Google had no idea how Essence Digital was going to actually run the campaign or make the video ads appear across the web.

Why Did Google Need An Outside Firm To Buy Video Ads?

Why Google needed an agency to do this for them is really weird, since Google’s own video ad network is a pretty effective way to place video ads across the web and in far more places that this campaign did.

So, a big question here remains: what exactly did Essence Digital promise to Google? What was so compelling about its pitch that Google wanted to go for it?

Unruly: We Didn’t Ask For Links & Don’t Care About Them

Meanwhile, as best I can tell, Essence Digital didn’t actually implement the campaign. Instead, video promotion company Unruly was used, as I suspected when writing my story last night. Unruly’s been in touch with me to say:

As Andrew Girdwood points out, Unruly never requires bloggers to link to back to an advertiser’s site. That’s because we’re in the business of video advertising not search engine marketing, so we couldn’t care less about link juice. We don’t ask for it, we don’t pay for it, and we don’t track it.

In line with FTC and EU regulation Unruly always requires that bloggers clearly disclose any post, tweet, or other reference to the video as being sponsored and we provide guidance on how to do this. We also request that if they do link anywhere they use nofollow, both because that’s best practice and also because it’s in their own interest to do so.

Unruly is committed to an ethical, legal, and totally transparent approach to online marketing. It’s crucial that posts are clearly marked as sponsored and that links are marked as nofollow. And it’s crucial that opinions belong to the author, which is why we never push an angle or opinion, and also why, occasionally, bloggers will unfortunately pen a post that deviates from our guidelines, as here. Where that happens, we’re very happy to have it pointed out and will cure the infraction as fast as possible.

As I said in the story, I didn’t expect that Unruly would ask bloggers to link to the site. No smart company trying to buy links would do that, hoping instead that it would just happen naturally.

Unruly Doesn’t Care About “Link Juice” But Has Terms About PageRank?

However, to say that “we couldn’t care less about link juice” is obviously not true. In Unruly’s terms and conditions, as I wrote about yesterday, there’s this statement:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached;

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. But a comment from my earlier post from who seems to be Unruly CEO Scott Button addresses this:

On the reference to PageRank in our Ts&Cs, Unruly uses a number of data sources and statistical techniques, that may include PageRank checks, to protect our advertisers from low quality video views. These measures are in place to protect the revenues of high quality sites and to ensure that views of the video represent genuine user interest – they have nothing to with search engine marketing

OK, but it’s hard to argue that Google was delivered high-quality views from the campaign that was just run, I’d say. Also interesting, I’m virtually certain this section of the Unruly terms was added after my story was posted:

where you write an editorial post linking to or embedding a Branded Video any links within this post or associated with it which link to the Advertiser’s website need to be marked with a ‘nofollow’ tag in accordance with Google guidelines. Any infraction of this rule may result in any payment being suspended or withheld.

I don’t recall seeing this yesterday, because I did a keyword search against this page for both nofollow and Google. I found nothing about nofollow mentioned (otherwise, I’d have written about that). I did find a mention about Google, but only the single one that I noted. The Internet Archive also shows that this wasn’t part of the page last year.

It might be that Unruly, in this particular campaign, wasn’t concerned about gathering up link credit. I’d certainly agree that was probably not the intention.

But in other campaigns, with terms like that, it suggests that Unruly is trying to buying links. That sort of means that Google is potentially doing business with the same type of drug dealer it’s trying to put out of business, though it has an intermediary involved.

JavaScript Might Not Block Link Credit

Unruly also did an interview with AllThingsD, talking about, as in the statement I received, that no one is asked to link, but if they do, they’re asked to use nofollow. Further, the company said, “All links from the video player are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings.”

As I covered in my earlier story, wrapping links in Javascript doesn’t necessarily block credit from being passed (and see also here). Only Google can really tell us what the situation is. So, we’re waiting for Google’s spam team to weigh in (which might be delayed, as I know that the head of that team, Matt Cutts, is currently on vacation).

I’m hoping to see both the exact instructions that the bloggers were given, as well as learning more about what exactly Google thought it was buying. It’s likely there’s plenty of wiggle room for Google to claim that if any paid links did end up being purchased, it wasn’t its fault — an excuse that hasn’t saved others from penalties like JC Penney, so the Google Chrome page might still face a ban.

Biggest Issue Remains: Garbage Content

The bigger issue in all this, as I wrote before, is that the campaign produced a lot of garbage content. That doesn’t mean that Google Chrome gets banned. Rather, it’s just embarrassing to Google, when it has been busy trying to prevent this type of content from ranking in its own search engine.

Postscript: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

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• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
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“This Post Sponsored By Google”

Aaron Wall wrote about the campaign today at SEO Book, spotting how a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” brings back over 400 pages written apparently as part of a Google marketing campaign:

We’re checking with Google for confirmation that the company is behind the campaign, but expect a response to be delayed, as Google’s PR department, like much of Google, is off today. But it certainly appears to be Google-backed.

Google Buys Links

The campaign is odd in two major ways. For one, it potentially violates Google’s guidelines against paid links.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn’t be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm.

And yet here, we see one of Google’s sponsored post doing exactly that:

The arrow points to a link leading to the Google Chrome download page. This is a straight link, not blocked with nofollow. It only appears in this post because the post is part of a sponsored campaign by Google, as noted at the bottom of the page. Therefore, both the author and Google itself are in violation of Google’s guidelines and risk being banned by Google.

The video itself is also a link. It’s not hosted on YouTube, nor does clicking on it bring up a video page. Instead, it leads to the Google Chrome download page, through a JavaScript link that Google would understand.

Will Google Ban Google Chrome?

Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue. In 2009, Google penalized Google Japan for its own search results for the same issue, not removing it but reducing its ability to rank for 11 months.

Potentially, all this means that Google will have to ban the Google Chrome download page over paid links. That would suck for Google, since it’s busy running ads for Google Chrome, which will in turn prompt people to search for it. Right now, the page appears at the top of results for searches on google chrome:

A ban would make it disappear for anything from a month to a year, based on how Google’s handled past penalties.

From the posts that I’ve reviewed, most do not seem to have links to Google or the Google Chrome page. In addition, I expect that Google probably never instructed anyone to directly link to anything.

The campaign — most likely run by third-party Unruly, based on where the video is hosted and handy if Google wants to pass the blame — probably had instructions that just said people should write about whatever they want, positive or negative, with the only requirement being that the Chrome video be included as part of their post.

Google’s Garbage Content Campaign

That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

Consider the post above that I highlighted, which says:

Having a small business, I have found Google to be a key element in getting my business out to the online community. I have put so much money into advertisements and at the end of the day, my analytics show that Google is still the top referrer to my business. That has said a lot to me and I started to invest a lot of time into SEO. If you do your SEO it right on your website, Google will propel your business to another level. As a small business, my voice is bigger and better because of Google. It takes me from just being a local business to working with clients world wide.

What’s that got to do with the purported focus of this post: “Google Chrome Helping Small Business.” The author is saying nothing about how Google Chrome has helped her business or any business she knows of. Instead, Chrome only gets mentioned at the end, with text that seems pretty boilerplate to this campaign:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Avoid These “Reviews” Of Google Chrome

A different post is entitled “Review: Google Chrome” and says:

I wanted to share a quick note on Google Chrome; more specifically, I want to share how it can change your small business. It is no secret that there are endless ways to expand your small businesses; however, what is the best way to accomplish that? These days, it’s hard to know who to trust, but with the name Google, you know you are in good hands. I am sure most of you are familiar, but check out this video! It will inspire you to do more.

Ready for that in-depth review? Here it comes:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Fortunately, if you search for “google chrome review,” that post doesn’t make it into the top results. However, consider this search for google chrome benefits:

Imagine you’re someone trying to understand the benefits to using Google Chrome versus other browsers. Out of 21 million possible matches, two of Google’s sponsored garbage posts make it into the top ten results. Here’s what one of the top ranked posts says:

“The Benefits Of Google Chrome,” the post is entitled. And those benefits?

The Internet has many wonderful tools for helping us save money. There are great blogs written by passionate people teaching us how to use coupons effectively. There are budgeting tools to assist us with maintaining a healthy financial life. There are small businesses who are available to provide quality products made locally. Whatever financial information it is you are looking for, you are bound to find it on the Internet. And Google Chrome can help you.

See anything there that’s Chrome-specific? I mean, Internet Explorer and Firefox could help you with all of these things, as well. So what are the unique benefits that Google Chrome will provide, from this author’s experience and knowledge?

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Ah, yes, that boilerplate text and video again.

Here’s what another post in the top results says:

The opening paragraph has 295 words generally about saving money and finding those who want to save money. None of it is about Google Chrome until you get to the last sentence, with 35 words that say:

This is where Google Chrome comes in, they offer a way for small businesses to get started easily and get their business name in to the online and social media world without spending a fortune.

After that, there’s no review of Chrome’s features. There’s no review of how Chrome can actually be used by small businesses. There’s just the standard copy about that Vermont business and the video.

The Video Isn’t Even About Chrome

How about the video itself that Google’s pushing? You may have seen on television already. It has nothing to do even with how Chrome actually helped the Vermont flour producer featured, King Arthur Flour, succeed. Here, watch it yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since King Arthur Flour has been online since at least December 2006, I’m willing to bet it got its start through the Internet Explorer browser. It sure wasn’t Chrome, which didn’t exist at the time.

By the way, while the company’s Google+ page gets featured in the ad, it’s not important enough to King Arthur Flour to be featured on its home page alongside the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, as you can see on the right.

So what have we got? 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.

Perhaps Google’s Ads Need Less Emotion & More Quality

Ironically, the New York Times had a great article today talking about how Google is working harder than ever to advertise itself, in particular to help promote Chrome. From the article:

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Actually, Google makes me want to cry for all the wrong reasons, such as an ad about Google Chrome that never explains what the hell Google Chrome is. Maybe that’s all about the curiosity Google’s trying to push:

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’ ”

If they don’t get out of bed thinking they need a new browser, there’s a good chance they don’t even think about what browser they currently use. So perhaps an ad that actually does explain the product features of Chrome might be more useful.

At the very least, if you’re going to do a sponsored post campaign, then make the posts have content that also explain the product, not a campaign that produces posts that violate your own content guidelines. Because when I read in the New York Times about the care taken to pick tablecloths for the Google Zeitgeist event for advertisers:

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Then this type of campaign feels like those linen tablecloths that Google wanted to avoid, sloppy and dirty.

Postscript: I heard back from one a blogger I contacted who had done one of these posts. She told me that she’d heard about the campaign through the SITS Girls community. After some searching, I can see that two pay-per-post campaigns run by Unruly have been offered there. One was for the American Cancer Society; the other for T-Mobile.

Both 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 for each. I can’t find that a Google campaign was offered this way, but it seems identical to the other campaigns that the community runsin conjunction with Unruly.

Also, the sign-up terms on the Unruly site have this interesting section:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached; or

These are general terms and might not apply to this particular campaign that Unruly appears to have run on behalf of Google. But regardless, it suggests that Unruly is indeed running campaigns with the intention of gaining better search rankings through paid links.

I say this because there is absolutely no other reason to link payment to the Google PageRank of a site unless you are trying to influence rankings.

Postscript 2: See our follow-up story, Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For.

Postscript 3: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

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• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
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• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
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• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

(Stock image courtesy of Shutterstock. Used under license.)

[Page] reorganized the company’s management structure, redesigned the face of the company’s products and pushed forward with a multibillion dollar deal to acquire a cellphone manufacturing outfit.

He also launched two other products aiming at Groupon, the leader of online coupons, and Facebook, the top social networking site.

Google (GOOG) in the past two quarters blew away analyst views while boosting revenue by 32% and 33%, respectively.

Page officially took over from Eric Schmidt in April (with the CEO switch announcement almost exactly a year ago). We wrote a number of articles at the time speculating about the rationale for the change and outlook for Google under Page’s leadership:

• Larry Page Takes The Helm As Google CEO Today
• Was It Time For A Fresh Face? Thoughts On Larry Page As The New Google CEO
• A To Do List For Google’s New CEO Larry Page
• Larry Page And The Reinvention Of “The Google”
• Google Turns To Page: The Day Two Narrative

Page has done a number of major things since taking over in April:

• Reorganized Google’s management structure for efficiency and faster decision-making
• Launched Google+ (and Google Offers)
• Shuttered numerous products and initiatives (and brought more focus)
• Bought Motorola Mobility (for $12.5 billion)

Most impressively however Page (and team) were conscious of the dangers of falling into a kind of bureaucratic malaise as the company matured — and sought to intervene in real time. There was already some evidence that it was happening. But to a large degree bureaucracy and its related challenges are a natural function of growth and maturation.

Companies periodically need to be “reinvented” or “shaken up” or they lose the qualities and momentum that made them successful. But reorgs can also go badly wrong. And while Page hasn’t “reinvented” Google he certainly has brought decisiveness and clarity, which seems to have reinvigorated the company in several respects.

What’s also interesting is that these changes internally are mirrored in a different way externally in Google’s increasing marketing polish and sophistication. Google’s consumer-facing TV commercials are an example — in particular its recent Muppet-themed TV promotion of Google+:

The commercial is not only clever it was likely expensive to produce. Google had to obtain the rights to the Queen-David Bowie song “Under Pressure” and gain agreement from Disney for use of the Muppets in the spot. It’s also not something that one would have imagined from Google as recently as a couple of years ago and reflects a philosophical shift toward consumer marketing. We can see it in the way Google is now marketing Android too.

Having said all that, Page still faces many challenges and the road ahead is lined with legal potholes. Indeed, Page is under more legal pressure, so to speak, than was his predecessor Eric Schmidt. And 2012 should bring some of that to a head, at least in Europe.

Yet, so far, Page’s tenure has been impressive. In less than a year, he has managed to accomplish almost everything he set out to do.

NOTE: For the latest news on the 2011 Santa Tracker, see our post: Where’s Santa Claus? The 2011 Santa Tracker List, From NORAD To Your Phone!

Where’s Santa? Google & NORAD Know

Let’s start with Santa. Since it’s not Christmas Eve, the site has a countdown until it begins Santa tracking operations for 2011:

The site also has holiday video messages and “Countdown Village,” where kids try to discover which part of the village is busiest:

On Christmas Eve, the real action begins. You’ll be able to track Santa Claus on a map, through your phone and watch videos. Google’s blog post explains more, as does our story from last year. Here’s also highlight from last year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bing’s Calendar Of Surprises

Over at Bing, the Bing Magical Holiday Calendar is brand new. Like an Advent calendar, you can “open” one of the many items each day for a suprise:

Currently, selecting the first day plays a video highlighting key events from the year:

The video often swoops back to put the subjects in the context of a search at Bing:

Bing doesn’t have the video up on either its own Bing Originals channel or its YouTube channel, but it’s pretty nice.

The Bing blog post about the calendar says that it’s also offering the chance to win prizes, but I saw nothing like that myself. Perhaps that will be part of future surprises under those numbers.

Bing also has some cute Christmas TV ads running. See our previous post about that:

• Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Search Engine? Bing’s New TV Ads Have A Ranking/Bass Stop-Motion Flavor.

As for the Google-NORAD Santa Tracker, be sure to return to that on Christmas Eve.  To really understand all you’ll be able to do, see our detailed review from last year:

• Where Is Santa Claus? The 2010 Santa Tracker List, From NORAD To Google Earth

The commercial highlighted some of the features of Google +, focusing on the circles and hangouts features – but mostly on circles. The goal of the commercial was to communicate how Google + enables you to share as you would in “real life,” i.e. share certain things with certain groups of friends.

Here is the commercial:

This is not the first time Google aired a TV commercial. They did so back in February 2010 at the Super Bowl. Since then, seeing a TV commercial from Google is not all that uncommon. However, prior to that, seeing a TV ad from Google was “implausible” as Jason Kincaid said.

Related Articles:

• Google Airs TV Ad During Super Bowl – But Why?
• First Look: “Hands On” With Google+
• Google’s Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives
• Google Plus: Big With Status-Seeking Singles; Losing Ground At Colleges & Cafes
• Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More
• What Businesses & Brands Can Use Google Plus Pages For Now
• Up Close With Creating & Managing Google+ Pages

The Dear Sophie creative was especially popular among women between 16 and 20, and 36 to 49, who rated it extremely highly for likeability, attention, change and relevance. Other Google spots that made the top ten include The Johnny Cash Project, It Gets Better, Lady Gaga: Mother Monster and Mom & Pop: Daniel & Jennifer Northcutt.

Google’s success is especially notable given that the company had a long history of being wary of marketing spending. For quite a while, Google contended that its products spoke for themselves, and it relied on word-of-mouth to spread the word about new releases. In the last few years, however, the company has succumbed and begun marketing in earnest, even buying a Super Bowl ad.

Effective Bing ads include two featuring the Krochet Kids, a non-profit that trains women in Uganda to crochet, then selling the hats they make. The third highlights the Real Steel motion picture, showing how a person could find out about the movie, showtimes, and coordinate with friends using Bing’s features.

The element that unifies the effective ads is storytelling. Rather than simply explaining the product’s features, these ads tell stories in which the technology is the hero. In “Dear Sophie,” Gmail and the Chrome browser allow the new father to connect with his daughter. In “The Johnny Cash Project,” YouTube allows music video producers to share a crowdsourced video of Johnny Cash’s final recording. The Krochet Kids ad tells the story of the non-profit organization.

Additionally, Ace Metrix noted that Google’s success was also driven by extensive testing. Google releases videos on YouTube and can gauge reaction before committing to the big bucks for TV placement.