Some of the world’s most popular websites have been penalised by Google in what may be the first round of a wider battle about how much power the search firm wields over the internet.

The Washington Post, Engadget - the popular gadget blog - and Forbes, the business publication, are among the sites to have had their Google rankings lowered after they were found to be embedding ‘paid for’ links on their pages - a practice the search company is keen to stamp out.

Google said it had lowered several sites’ PageRank - a mark it gives them out of 10 which is supposed to reflect how useful they are - where they had been found to be receiving money in return for linking to sites so that the latter could in turn perform better in search queries.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article2777108.ece