Remember when Google was involved in that controversy regarding paid links on blog posts about the company’s Chrome browser? As people had caught wind of what was going on, Google implemented a PageRank penalty on Chrome’s landing page, which knocked it down in search results.
“In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days,” Google’s Matt Cutts said at the time. “After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”
This was Google’s effort to show others that it would treat its own properties the same as others’. It looked like this had a direct impact on Chrome’s market share, at a time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was showing signs of improvement.
The penalty has now been lifted, as the 60-day mark has come. Barry Schwartz reports that Google has confirmed this.
It will be very interesting to see how Chrome’s market share numbers look after being out of the penalty box for a while.