Back in January, it was discovered that Chrome's PageRank was being boosted as part of a third party's marketing campaign. Google claimed it had nothing to do with the effort, placing the blame solely on the marketing firm, Unruly Media. As a result, Google manually lowered the PageRank for a period of "at least 60 days." That penalty has now come to an end, with Chrome's normal PageRank restored.
There's no exact date for when the penalty was lifted, although SearchEngineLand first noted the restored PageRank on March 16th. The value of a PageRank number is determined by how many sites link back to the original. Google demoted "google.com/chrome" to 0, the lowest possible, with it having being restored to 7 as of writing.
Unruly Media was reportedly authorized only to run online adverts to promote Google's Chrome browser. The firm seems to have gone one step further, with evidence being uncovered of blogs being paid to link back to Chrome.
Right now, searching for "browser" with Google reveals that Mozilla's Firefox sits at the top of the listings, followed by Opera and Safari. The first listing for Chrome, meanwhile, is the seventh link down. Chrome's market share continues to skyrocket, with it briefly overtaking Microsoft's Internet Explorer last week. StatCounter currently puts Chrome's market share at 30.8%.
[via Computerworld]
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