Not sure about Google

[Lamplighter]

Today's news makes it apparent payments were made to bloggers.
Maybe this restores a bit of confidence in the directions of new management at Google.

Computer World
By Gregg Keizer
January 4, 2012

Google downgrades Chrome ranking after paid-link monkey business
Slaps own browser with 60-day penalty, buries download page in search results

The decision to demote Chrome's PageRank
-- the rating Google assigns to sites based on how many other sites link to them --
came after bloggers Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Danny Sullivan
of SearchEngineLand revealed a marketing campaign that paid other bloggers
to create generic posts which linked to a video touting Chrome to small businesses.
The problem, said Wall and Sullivan, was that Google's own rules prohibit paying for links.<snip>

"We strive to enforce Google's webmaster guidelines consistently
in order to provide better search results for users," said the Google spokesman Tuesday.
"While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations
of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard,
so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."<snip>