Google Accidentally Illustrates the SEO’s Agent/Principal Conflict

Google has just gotten slammed for apparently subsidizing a huge number of low-quality blog posts, all linking to the Google Chrome download page. Take away the Google brand name, and it’s a classic low-quality SEO campaign: each blog post sticks to a pretty simple template, and is clearly written in order minimize the amount of effort that went into it.

It’s a clear violation of Google’s guidelines, which strongly argue against cookie-cutter content and also ban sponsored posts outside of a few narrow exceptions (which this doesn’t fall into). And from the posts, it’s clear why Google wouldn’t want this stuff on the web: it’s a bad user experience, because it’s a kind of cargo-cult marketing that emulates the form of an article marketing-driven campaign, without any of the substance.

So why is Google, whose search engine invests lots of effort in stamping this stuff out, suddenly using these tactics?

The most likely answer is that they’re not, and that what they did illustrates the lurking conflict of interest in web-based marketing. As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out, this campaign was likely done through Unruly Media, a social media marketing firm. So the likely process was:

1. Google’s marketing team has some goals for downloading Chrome, and loose guidelines for how they make that happen.
2. They outsourced to third parties with even looser restrictions.
3. There may be several layers of outsourcing beyond this—in general, highly scalable SEO and social media firms work with agencies, not with end users.
4. At every stage, the company willing to cut the most corners can offer the low bid.

(Which means the more interesting story is that if Unruly is behind this, they made the most tone-deaf business decision since the CEOs of major US automakers commuted to their congressional hearing by private jet.)

It’s less of a PR snafu when this happens to other companies, but it’s almost certainly the story behind the story at JC Penney. And the unfortunate upshot of this is that there isn’t a good way to police the agency conflict here—the best thing for Google to do is to presume guilt given the evidence of guilt. First of all, that gives clients an incentive to do their due diligence. Second, it means claiming ignorance doesn’t become a marketing strategy for corner-cutters. And finally, it’ll make the web a better place; regardless of who had what motivations and who knew what when, these blog posts are the kind of crummy content that Google needs to eliminate any incentive to produce.