• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 3, 2012

Google is reportedly paying bloggers to run posts promoting its Chrome browser. As for whether the practice is ethical, or violates Google’s own terms of service, the jury is still out.

SEO Book, which first spotted to practice, calls it “Orwellian” since “Google has a clear pro-corporate big brand bias to their algorithms & layout.”

In at least one instance, a blogger’s post linked to Google in seeming violation of Google’s policy against “paid links,” reports Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan.

“This is interesting, because Google has never allowed paid links inside their search results,” writes 9to5Google.

Calling the behavior “jaw-dropping,” Sullivan writes: “Google, the company that has been fighting against paid links and ‘thin’ content, seems to be behind a campaign that’s generating both on behalf of its Chrome browser. File this under ‘what were they thinking?’”

For what it’s worth, AllThingsD reports that Google isn’t actually running the campaign itself. “Yup -- Google, which dominates both Web advertising and Web video, relies on an outsider to promote its Web video ads,” it quips.

Unruly Media, the London-based company responsible for the campaign, doesn’t see anything wrong with the effort. The only issue, as Unruly CEO Scott Button tells AllThingsD, is a one-off, technical mistake by a single blogger.

“As far as I’m aware, there was one link in one post that was not marked nofollow,” Button writes in an email to AllThingsD. “This was corrected as soon as we became aware of it.”

Still, Button fails to address Sullivan’s complaint that the text in the bloggers’ post is, as AllThingsD puts it, “barely better than garbage.”

Meanwhile, “In a similar situation in the past, Google punished itself,” CNet points out. “Google Japan hired a company called CyberBuzz that paid bloggers to post about Google features. After that came to light, Google penalized Google Japan itself in search-engine rankings.”