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Overstock.com said Thursday it has discontinued the practice that caused Google to punish the Salt Lake City company's search results.
Overstock.com violated the giant search engine company's policies by artificially boosting its ranking when consumers searched for certain products, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
As a result, Overstock.com's products that had ranked near the top of search results fell to the fifth or sixth page by this week, the newspaper reported.
Overstock.com would not say how the search company's actions may affect traffic to its site. The company is overwhelmingly dependent on sales on its websites.
Google's actions resulted from the Utah company convincing university webmasters to provide "discount links" to faculty and students, Overstock.com said.
That practice apparently boosted the company's results on Google, whose search rankings depend in part on how many links a site has from other sites.
"Google has now made clear it believes these links should not factor into their search algorithm," said Overstock.com spokesman Roger Johnson in an e-mail. "We understand Google's position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google's guidelines."
He said the practice was discontinued about two weeks ago "when we notified university webmasters and worked aggressively to get them either to pull-down or no-follow the links. Unfortunately, we cannot control how quickly university webmasters work, and some of them have needed to be taught how to properly no-follow a link."
The New York Times recently reported that Google also had lowered the ranking of search results J.C. Penney Co. had in response to tactics employed by a consultant to drive traffic in its behalf.