At some point during March, Google lifted the penalty it had imposed on Chrome the first week of January, when it demoted the search ranking of the browser's download page, www.google.com/chrome. It's unclear when Google restored the browser's search rank; first reported the punishment's expiration on March 16.

The decision to -- the rating Google assigns to sites based on how many other sites link to them -- came after SEO Book and SearchEngineLand revealed a marketing campaign that paid bloggers to create generic posts that linked to a video touting Chrome to small businesses.

Google forbids sponsored links, and the company has in the past.

On Jan. 4, Matt Cutts, who heads the Google team responsible for monitoring linking rules, announced that the Chrome download site's PageRank would be downgraded and kept there for at least 60 days.

Google demoted the download page's search ranking to 0, the lowest-possible score in PageRank's 0-10 range.