Last week Google got caught breaking their own rules! Aaron Wall at SEO Book caught Google red handed… BUYING BACKLINKS! This is practice that they forbid search and content marketers from using. 
This campaign clearly violates Google’s own SEO quality guidelines. Google actually used an outside marketing firm to publish sponsored blog posts touting their Chrome web browser’s capabilities and playing it up as a small business tool. The firm paid for the placement of these peices, many of which included direct links to YouTube videos on YouTube and the Chrome download page.
HOWEVER… once the story broke, Google promptly punished themselves!
The homepage for Google’s Chrome web browser will have an imposed page rank reduction for a 60 days. This is along the lines of the punishment you or I would have received if we were caught doing the same thing. Google has punished other high-profile companies in this way in the past (JCPenny, Overstock.com).
This has put Mozilla’s Firefox browser back in the #1 spot for terms like “browser” and “web browser” and dumped Chrome off the first page.
My only question is… if you were going to break the rules to rank Chrome higher, why pay a marketing agency for it? Why not just make yourself #1? I mean… they’re Google… they own the results pages, right? I guess they were too ethical for that.
