Aaron Wall, the author of SEO Book, first broke the news after discovering it in one of his forums. In short, Google apparently violated its own Webmaster Guidelines for paid links as part of a marketing campaign for Google Chrome.

“It was obviously paid exposure,” said Wall.

Shortly after this interview was conducted, Google responded to the incident and devalued its Chrome landing page for “at least 60 days,” according to the company’s Webspam Head Matt Cutts.

In a statement to WebProNews, a Google spokesperson said:

“Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

Wall did tell us that he hoped that, going forward, Google would be more “lenient” when dealing with others since mistakes can happen to anyone, even search giants.

First of all, although social is growing in popularity and value, Clay says it is still hard to determine the extent of its impact on search. Both people and businesses are still learning how to use it. He believes there are two different camps on social. The first is similar to PPC since users can leverage ads in their social networks. This way can be thought of as an ad network, and it allows users to drive traffic and raise awareness.

He classifies the second camp as being closer to SEO since it can be used to encourage people to link to you. In addition, it can be used for reputation management. Just as SEO and PPC are more effective together, using both camps of social media are equally important. He says marketers will miss out on valuable opportunities if they do not utilize social media.

Linking is another area that has changed. As Clay discusses, there are several ways to do links such as stimulating people socially, begging for links, and being a link magnet. Social media is tied to the aforementioned stimulating people for links and also to link begging, since it could provide a target through a social relationship. As he points out, link magnets are the best method because marketers create great content that people want to link to.

Although link networks are also included in linking practices, Clay believes they could become a serious problem. These networks allow one user or company to have some level of control over a group of different sites. Although he has no direct inclination from Google, he believes the search giant will crack down on this practice. He thinks Google has no choice but to either lighten up on its standards, which he believes is wrong, or enforce stronger regulation. If link networks were eliminated, he says there would be a “massive change in the linking structure and rankings.”

In regards to changes in search results, Clay recalls that Google offers more options, maps, and more in the SERPs. He predicts that searchers will be able to selectively turn on live feeds and engagements objects (video, images, etc.). Google has also made efforts pertaining to search intent and behavior. With linking practices changing as well, he believes we will see many new developments in search results. Additionally, he says these changes will continue and traditional SEO will lose its effectiveness.

Are you accommodating these changes?

The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly drafting guidelines for bloggers who promote products specifically when conflicts of interest are not disclosed to readers. In spite of that pending regulation, Google is raising concerns since its search engine cannot fully discern all paid and sponsored blog posts. The company recently frowned upon the practice at a recent blogger event.

Although paid sponsorships are commonplace in traditional media, Gray says people have the ability to distinguish when it is happening and when it is not. The Internet however is a whole new space in which the sponsorships are not as obvious.

As a result, Google is struggling to figure out how to handle the issue. The company would like to see more user data and multiple sources that verify the post and links. As Matt Cutts of Google said on his blog: “We [Google] take the subject of paid posts seriously and take action on them.”

What are your thoughts regarding sponsored posts? Do you believe it’s wrong?

Matt says, “We [he and Michael] don’t always see eye-to-eye (Nah, really?!) …  but one thing that Michael and I both agree on is that hacking sites to get links is basically pure evil.”

What will happen if you don’t heed this advice? According to Michael, “… your sites are gonna burn in hell.”

This has been a Public Service Announcement brought to you by WebProNews.

UPDATE:
Clearly, based on some of the comments, some of you are unaware that this was intended simply as a fun video. It is a spoof of the Pat Robertson/Al Sharpton PSA about the environment from a year or so ago.  You can go see that video here then watch ours. I thought it was funny…

Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.

As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.

At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?

According to Google Blogoscoped, Akky Akimoto wrote on the Asiajin blog that Google Japan was paying bloggers to evaluate a new Google widget through a pay-per-post service called CyberBuzz.

Asiajin says, “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ‘ad’ tags which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers.” The post also said, “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” (Correction: I misinterpreted Akky Akimoto. The ‘ad’ tags are actually referring to article-type advertisements on the news website Gigazine.)

Google issued an apology that reads:

“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.”

Matt Cutts twittered “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” He expresses Google’s deep remorse and apologizes on the company’s behalf in this video.

Speaking on his own feelings, Matt says he was “mortified” when he heard about the incident. He goes on to say that Google’s position on paid links has not changed.

To correct the issue, Google is asking the bloggers to remove their paid posts. Matt also says Google realizes its need to continue to communicate and explain its position on paid links.

“This is something that we should have done better and I hope we will do better in the future.”

Keep watching WebProNews for the full interview with Matt Cutts including top security issues of this year and the latest on Google’s personalized search efforts.

Here’s the question that causes so much debate: Is link buying good or bad? Which is it? If you are selling links and making money, then it seems to be working out “good” for you. Another scenario in which it seems to be “good” is when you are purchasing links and your ranking is improving.

In the above video, Rand says:

“The only people that think it’s [the practice of buying links] bad are search engineers who think it lowers relevancy.”

Rand goes on to say that sometimes it lowers relevancy and sometimes it doesn’t. In other words, the relevancy aspect shouldn’t be the deciding factor on whether buying links are good or bad.

In his presentation at PubCon, Rand gave a few examples of how to buy links without actually “buying links.” A website purchase is one way to buy links without outright buying a specific link. CondeNet bought several websites and now links to them. The technique behind this is to find relevant websites, make a purchase, and then create relevant links that fulfill your needs.

Another way Rand suggests is through blogger product reviews. SEOmoz blogged about a free book they received and linked to their site. Build strong relationships with bloggers. Ask for a review, not a link, and most likely, you’ll get it.

A third method Rand suggests is through content partnerships. VentureBeat and Read Write Web are partners with the New York Times. The NYT needs their feeds and VentureBeat and Read Write Web are now associated with a big brand.

Changing subjects slightly, Rand also had a few remarks to make about Bruce Clay’s claim of “ranking is dead.” While Google’s personalization and localization practices will continue to influence ranking, Rand says it doesn’t mean that you should give up on SEO efforts to rank high in the search engines. SEO will always bring value to the results and user behaviors cannot change that.

As for Rand’s predictions for 2009, he indicates how he would like to see the rumored Apple search engine and foresees a renewed focus on organic search in the midst of a troubled economy.

Video Length: 30 sec.