Google Chrome is being given a slap on the wrists by its creators, Google, after it violated its own guidelines.
Alongside an ad campaign for Chrome, paid for links were found to link directly back to Google Chrome. The search giant has specific guidelines against paid links but the PR company, Unruly Media, responsible for one of its recent campaigns did not adhere to the rules.
Sponsored links should use a ‘nofollow’ attribute to ensure they don’t pass credit to Google’s ranking algorithm. As punishment, Google Chrome will have a lower PageRank for at least 60 days.
In his blog post, Matt Cutts of Google, said, “After [60 days], 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 google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”
