Yesterday, Google demoted its own Google Chrome homepage in pagerank for at least 60 days following the revelation that the browser’s online advertising campaign violated Google’s policy banning the use of paid links. Google had contracted with an outside firm to handle Chrome’s the campaign, and it mutated into a scheme where bloggers were paid to link to a video that extolled the virtues of Chrome to small businesses.

Thus Google was violating its own policies, the stated punishment for which is demotion in search results. Google says that it didn’t know that its sub-contractor was doing this, but nonetheless issued this statement:

“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. 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.”

Today, if you do a Google search for “browser,” Chrome doesn’t appear on the first page of results.

Living by your own rules is the mark of integrity. This time, Google delivered.