Google Auto-sanction: a slight drop for Chrome

Things haven’t gone quite as planned, with a small drop in user figures being registered for Google Chrome according to Net Applications statistics. The degradation is expected due to the lower PageRank enforced by Google.

This is a first according to Net Applications statistics. The continual growth of the browser has until now been steady, with this being the first time that a slight drop has been seen, with Google Chrome’s market share having increased since its release.

In January 2012, Google Chrome lost… 0.17 precent to move down to 18.94%. This is a slight drop which shouldn’t really cause any great problems for the search giant, with their aim remaining to become the second most widely used browser in the world.

At the same time, Firefox (currently the world’s second most used browser according to Net Applications) lost 0.95 percent for a total market share of 20.88%. The other surprise is that Internet Explorer managed to increase their share by reversing their falling share. IE is credited with 52.96% market share (+1.09 points).

Possible causes of Chrome’s drop
Net Applications puts forward that a reason for Google Chrome’s drop could be linked to Google’s auto-sanction. At the start of January, Google reset Google Chrome’s official download page ranking to zero. This means that it was removed from the first few pages of the search engines results.

This decision was taken following the revelation of unfavourable practices – two sizes, two measures – which Google has rejected due to a lake of participants. Numerous American blogs published sponsored posts which promoted Google Chrome. The problem for these posts is that they didn’t contain the nofollow attribute, pointing their hyperlinks to the Google Chrome download page. This was an infraction of Google’s policy on commercial links.

It should be noted that while the official Google Chrome download site greatly dropped in the search engines official rankings, the sanction was only imposed on third party sites which offered the browser for download.