Not sure about Google

[BigV]

https://plus.google.com/109412257237...ts/NAWunDzJSHC

Matt Cutts - Yesterday 5:36 PM - Public
Sorry that it took me until now to comment on the situation that Danny wrote about at http://searchengineland.com/google-c...d-posts-106551 . I’m in Central America this week and my ability to reach the internet hasn't been great.

I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. 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...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.

Read the comments as much as you like, there's a vast amount of context there, more than I can regurgitate here. The upshot is that the thing they tried to do, buy video ads for chrome, is legal, and legitimate and within the guidelines. Of the video ads they bought, one was made in a way that had an aspect that caused the pagerank to be affected, a violation of google's policies. this video ad produced by someone else and paid for by google, was what was being complained about by the two SEO entrepreneurs/authors. It has been corrected, and a penalty applied for the violation.

in the comments, there's a lot of back and forth about whether or not the rule is being applied fairly, some say yes, some say no. about whether or not the penalty is too harsh as it stands on the books, yes and no again. about whether or not google's punishing google the same wayfor the same violation as it would punish other companies, large and small. no surprise, some say yes, some say no.

TO ME. It seems that google's following their own rules. not only that, they're being extra diligent about following them since they're being punished for the actions of a third party. whatever. I also find it above and beyond that the manager in charge of this crap is answering the issue while on vacation in central america, and doing so in this very public way.

I believe this is acting in accordance with their words. Words are cheap. These actions though are not made out of hot air. This is what "doing no evil" looks like. Transparent, accountable, honest. That's my take on it.