At this point, we all know what happened few days ago about Google, Google Chrome and paid links.

If you missed that, first: where do you live? joking. Take your time and read this post by Danny Sullivan , and then the consequences of Google misbehaviour .

After this news, Twitter was on fire. A lot of great SEOs I’m following were talking about what happened, and a lot of them wrote about this in their blogs, dropping theories and saying different things. It was really interesting.

I read a post by Rishi Lakhani called “Learning from The Chrome Penalty” which I suggest you to go and read it, where he actually analyzed what happened to SERPs when searching for keywords like “browser” or “chrome” in google.com after Google said it was going to penalize Google Chrome official page for the situation we talked before.

So, I was curious what happen to SERPs for the same keywords in Google.it, since there are always some difference and here’s what I found.

When searching for “browser” in Google.it, there are 1.690.000.000 results.

Before finding something about Chrome, we have to scroll to the 50th result, on the 5th page , where there is the official page for Google Chrome.

So I think it’s safe to say that for browser they punished Google Chrome quite hard.

Then, I looked for “chrome” as query, always in Google.it. For this, I find 851.000.000 results; “chrome” has search volume = 165.000.

The SERPs here are a little bit difference, and more on the Google side 🙂

No sign of the official page, but still. The first result is the page of Chrome’s extension. This page is on a subdomain of Google.com .

The second result is really curious to me. It leads to a sort of comic book online of 39 pages about how cool Chrome is. I have to say: it’s well done, it’s funny, licensed under Creative Commons, and words by Google Chrome Team.

OK, it’s not the official page for Google browser, but…you see on the upper left part of the image? There is a perfect link to Google Chrome official page, and the same link is present in every single page of this ebook. So yeah, I thought. In the extensions page, I did not find any link to Chrome, but here it’s pretty clear the  correlation, and to be honest I never saw this page before when looking for Chrome, but I don’t remember well. This googlebooks is a subdomain of Google.com.

The other results are other sites, including Wikipedia Italian and English pages, with have both more backlinks compared to the Google Book page (I didn’t check this deeply, but it’s even pretty obvious). But still, that Google comic book page is ranking in the second position.

Compared to Google.com, there are no pages from the support part of Google.

At the end, I tried to see what happen when searching for “google chrome”. Here the results are a little bit different:

The third result here is the support page for Chrome, as happening in US, with no sitelinks though. Here we see another result at the 8th position. It’s the download page for Google Chrome Canary (I didn’t know about it, if you wanna learn what it is , read this). But still no official Chrome page, but for “google chrome” there is the support page which is not present when searching only for “chrome”.

What do I think about the whole situation? hard to say. I don’t think that Google needs to do dirty things (easily perceptible) to have some links, but at the same time it appears really strange that they don’t know what exactly each department is doing. And I read a lot of posts, that I don’t want to say something inappropriate, because now I’m seeing Google sponsored links even when I’m reading on my Kindle 🙂

So here what I found, on january 4th 2012 after the Google-gate scandal :). Anyway, if  you don’t, follow Rishi.

ps: This post was written listening to “Frequencies” by LFO.