London: The home page of Google Chrome has been demoted from the search result after it came under heavy scrutiny for using paid links in spam pages to endorse their software.
Google Chrome is world’s second most accepted browser. According to Google’s own guidelines it’s illegal to pay for any such links since they can artificially enhance a website’s rank, The Telegraph reports.
Google’s search algorithm is planned to find high quality, original content that has been linked to without money changing its hands. Google manually demotes websites that are found using paid links to improve their position.
“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to relegate www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s Page Rank for a period of at least 60 days,” a spokesman said. “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,” he added.
Essence Digital, a London-based digital marketing agency had commissioned the sponsored blog postings and Google has claimed that it never permitted this campaign.
“Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users,” Essence Digital said, apologizing for the sponsored postings,” he added.
The self impose punishment has yielded dramatic results for Google Chrome as it now lies at 73rd rank in the search list of any ‘browser’ and earlier it was at 2nd place.
ANI
