Thursday, February 24, 2011

Overstock.com Hit By Google Penalty

Salt Lake City-based online retailer Overstock.com has been hit by a major search penalty from search engine Google. According to a report from the WSJ, Google is penalizing Overstock for artificially boosting rankings in the search engine through its linking policies. The WSJ said the firm's results have now dropped from the top pages on many search terms to the fifth or sixth page of Google's results. The penalties came after Overstock.com encouraged colleges and universities to post links to its site from .edu addresses--a move which had helped boost its rankings, because Google's algorithm weights .edu links more heavily than other sites.