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Hi,

as far as I was able to get information about the overvstock penalty
overstock is penalized for giving discount to .edu webmaster who where
linking back to overstock.com with certain keywords. that overstock is
penalized for adopting rdfa and goodrelations sounds to me more like a
cock-and-bull story.

Have a look at this:
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In Overstock’s case, the retailer offered discounts of 10% on some
merchandise to students and faculty. In exchange, it asked college and
university websites to embed links for certain keywords like “bunk
beds” or “gift baskets” to Overstock product pages… Google’s
guidelines ask websites not to participate in “schemes” that are
“intended to manipulate PageRank,” and it forbids sites from paying
other sites to embed certain links on their pages. Many schemes
intended to trick Google’s search algorithm have included .edu links,
search-engine experts say.

“There is big money in .edu links because they are ‘trusted sites’ in
Google’s eyes,” said David Harry, president of Reliable SEO, a SEO
specialist based in Canada.
---
Source: http://www.inquisitr.com/99206/overstock-in-trouble-with-google/

>From my point of view this might be the reason for overstock.com being
penalized by google!

regards

Christian Junghanns