After 17 straight months of gains in market share, Google's Chrome web browser dropped 0.17 percent in January, and the company that tracks browser market share suggests that it's because Google penalized Chrome after a botched sponsored blog post campaign. The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites. According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft's Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly g [...]

Related Topics: Featured | Google: Chrome | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Searches for “browser” no longer bring up the Google Chrome home page after Google applied a penalty against the page because of Google's own sponsored post campaign. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Chrome | Google: Marketing | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Top News

It's been about a day since we covered Google's sponsored post campaign to promote its Chrome browser, a campaign that produced posts that violate Google's guidelines against "thin" content and potentially those against buying links. Yes, it was a Google campaign, but not what the company says it signed-up for. One agency is falling on its sword; another is saying no paid links were purchased. Let's piece through what we've got. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: Chrome | Google: Marketing | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Google, the company that has been fighting against paid links and "thin" content, seems to be behind a campaign that's generating both on behalf of its Chrome browser. File this under "what were they thinking." "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 [...]

Related Topics: Google: Chrome | Google: Marketing | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Six months ago, Google delisted all sites on a co.cc domain name. Today, they seem to have all returned. A search for [site:co.cc] currently returns 105,000,000 results. Google originally delisted the co.cc subdomains because Google saw a "very large fraction of sites" on that subdomain to be "spammy or low-quality" and felt it was warranted, in this case, to simply block the whole subdomain from showing up in Google's results. I am not sure if this change was intentional or a bug where after we write about it Google will delist the subdomains again. Here is what the resu [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Spamming | Top News