Google Chrome – Small step for Browser, Huge step for SEO linkbait

Google Chrome launched less than a day ago, and this has been one of the busiest days on my twitter, email and all in all web life.
I do not recall the last time the web was so obsessed with a launch of a beta product, so much conversations, expectations, opinions, buzz, hype, and web content spread in such a way.

I read the comic, read some opinions and downloaded Google Chrome last night. Indeed, it’s a neat cool fast and kinda stable browser, especially if you take into account it’s only in Beta.

But that’s not what Chrome is all about!

Google Chrome Link bait

Chrome is probably the best most successful piece of link bait campaign I saw, IMO, this is a real state of the art well planned online and offline PR move, which amazingly enough moved our entire industry the last 24 hours!!!

After all, and if we take the PR pitch and hype back to their real natural size and power, it’s a browser. It’s not an operating system (still running on windows last time I checked) and at best it will take a nice chunk of market share from Explorer and Firefox and make this life of adapting a website to browsers a bit more complicated.

But the linkbait… man this is fantastic.
So creative – going with the comics creative to make it stand out and tell us “hey, this one is not just a launch, it’s special!”
So well planned – After the “leak” to the blogosphere the media world i.e. newspapers, TV networks and of course the web got the news and everyone starting talking
The Differentiated Pitch: s it a browser? Is it an Operating system? Will it affect Microsoft? What about Firefox and their relationship?

And the results:

• 7,850,000 Search results for “google chrome”
• 8,117 news items on google news
• 73,902 blog results on Google blog search
• 1,380 videos on Google video
• ~2,000 mentions on twitter

In a matter of hours I received dozens of emails from friends, facebook messages, IM links, twitter messages, phone calls and an ongoing discussion in our office – simply and utterly beautiful!

So for sum?

Chapeau to Google’s PR team, Chapeau to the developers for a job well done on the browser and a special chapeau to this guy who offers to sell a chrome email address on eBay !!! (Thanks Olivier)