As reported in the Wall Street Journal , Google is penalizing Overstock.com Inc. in its search results.  It’s they ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their search engine ranking.

Overstock was encouraging websites at colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site.

It’s been the opinion of many that sites that end in .edu are considered by Google’s search algorithm to be more authoritative than commercial sites.