Google Chrome’s Paid Link Penalty Now Lifted

Google has lifted the 60-day paid link penalty Google Chrome was given the first week of January.

Now if you search for [chrome], [browser] or similar searches, the Google Chrome landing page will once again show up on the first page of the search results.

Here is a picture showing the page ranking in position number for on Google:

As you may remember, right after the New Years, Google was caught running a sponsored post campaign for Chrome. After a day or so, Google’s Matt Cutts applied a link penalty to the Google Chrome landing page for 60 days. Now, about days later, Google lifted the penalty.

A Google representative confirmed the penalty has been lifted.

Google told us in January:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.
We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Hat tip to Tamir Oron from SEO Israel.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.