Google is slapping itself on its own metaphorical wrist after a bit of controversy over sponsored Chrome ads on various blogs boosted the site’s Google PageRank. The company announced they’ll lower the offending page’s rank for two months at the least.

“We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote http://www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days,” a Google spokesman said in an email via PCMag.com.

The brouhaha was revealed this week when an SEO Book blogger pointed out that Google was most likely going against its rule that sponsored blog posts, including paid links to a site, not be allowed to influence search rankings.

Google has gone after other sites that violated its rules, and they say they’re taking themselves to task more than they usually would.

“We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users,” the 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.”

In this case, Google was working with a company called Unruly Media for its Chrome ads. Unruly says the video ads were wrapped with javascript that would prevent it from influencing search engine rankings. Bloggers are also supposed to use a “nofollow” tag in the code. That must’ve not happened, eh, Google?

Google Demotes Chrome Ranking Over Sponsored Blog Posts [PCMag]

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