2009 February, 10th

Mihaela Lica

Today Everything PR Goofy Award goes directly to Google, which proves once again to be lower than a snake’s belly in its PR (public relations) strategies.

Yesterday at eWritings I spoke about Google’s bag of dirty tricks in relation with Wikia Search and to my surprise Google was reported to be even dirtier by Akky Akimoto at Asiajin. The search giant that penalizes website owners for buying and selling links bought sponsored reviews from CyberBuzz, which is a PayPerPost type of service – probably the biggest on Japan.

If you remember back in 2007 Google penalized PayPerPost bloggers by resetting their Google PageRanks to zero. This caused financial loss to many bloggers who depended on their PageRanks to get better paid PPP opportunities.

Google did apologize for its unethical behavior:

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

How’s that for transparency?

Google discontinued an advertising campaign that consisted in buying links in sponsored reviews, but they did so only after Asiajin author Serkan Toto, who also happens to be a TechCrunch contributor, published the news at TechCrunch.

Would you consider this apology enough considering that Google already had a very vehement position against paid reviews and paid links? What kind of an example does a company set when it goes against its own TOS? Did anyone report Google to Google for buying links?

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About the Author

Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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